A Light in the Dark
2025
A Light in the Dark was a collaboration with the Whitworth Art Gallery and Manchester Academy High School that took place in June and July 2025. The project invited Year 9 pupils (aged 14-15) to explore what makes an image believable in a world saturated with photography, screens, and AI. Using a selection of surprising and often overlooked works from the Whitworth’s collection, students examined how value, trust, and interpretation are constructed and how easily they can be manipulated. They then reimagined these artworks through contemporary AI tools, creating their own responses that speak to their interests and digital fluency. The project turned the museum into a space of playful investigation, offering young people a chance to see how images guide, mislead, and shape the stories we tell.
As lead artist on this project, I proposed creating a ‘bootleg’ museum catalogue for an exhibition at the prestigious Whitworth Art Gallery by students of the neighbouring Manchester Academy. In a series of creative walks and workshops in the surrounding parkland and inside the museum, students were encouraged to explore the art collection and create their own works based on what they had seen and on their own experiences. These works were speculative and the renderings were made using AI to look as real and as convincing as possible. Curatorial texts were then written using ChatGPT and a booklet produced which was launched at an event hosted by the Whitworth on the 18 September 2025. Several of the speculative works were produced and framed, and now hang in the corridors of Manchester Academy.
Introduction text:
Between April and July 2025, something remarkable happened.
Forty-five pupils from Manchester Academy stepped into the Whitworth—some for the very first time—and began reimagining what an image can be. Under the guidance of artist Mishka Henner, they explored the threshold between the real and the virtual, the remembered and the imagined. In the gallery, they found a space where images could be made, remade, and questioned.
The works gathered in this exhibition, A Light in the Dark, reflect the worlds these young artists move between: screens and playgrounds, games and grief, family rituals and planetary emergencies. They draw from gaming platforms, pop culture, political realities, personal memory, dreams, and nightmares. In these images, fantasy can become a form of truth-telling, and everyday scenes can become mythical.
Some works cast a harsh light whilst others offer softness. All speak in the language of now—fragmented, hybrid, digitally fluent, and emotionally charged.
This catalogue is a record of their journey: bold, funny, searching, and deeply grounded in the textures of contemporary life. It reminds us that the Whitworth is a space where new voices take shape, where art becomes a way of mapping the contradictions of the present, and where light sometimes appears precisely when we step into the dark.
Andrew Vaughan
Education Partnerships Manager, the Whitworth
Download catalogue ︎︎︎ [3.3MB PDF]
Between April and July 2025, something remarkable happened.
Forty-five pupils from Manchester Academy stepped into the Whitworth—some for the very first time—and began reimagining what an image can be. Under the guidance of artist Mishka Henner, they explored the threshold between the real and the virtual, the remembered and the imagined. In the gallery, they found a space where images could be made, remade, and questioned.
The works gathered in this exhibition, A Light in the Dark, reflect the worlds these young artists move between: screens and playgrounds, games and grief, family rituals and planetary emergencies. They draw from gaming platforms, pop culture, political realities, personal memory, dreams, and nightmares. In these images, fantasy can become a form of truth-telling, and everyday scenes can become mythical.
Some works cast a harsh light whilst others offer softness. All speak in the language of now—fragmented, hybrid, digitally fluent, and emotionally charged.
This catalogue is a record of their journey: bold, funny, searching, and deeply grounded in the textures of contemporary life. It reminds us that the Whitworth is a space where new voices take shape, where art becomes a way of mapping the contradictions of the present, and where light sometimes appears precisely when we step into the dark.
Andrew Vaughan
Education Partnerships Manager, the Whitworth
Download catalogue ︎︎︎ [3.3MB PDF]
