One metre wide and nearly two metres tall, this monumental work by the award-winning artist Ruth Murray took around three months to create. Luminous at a distance and extraordinarily elaborate up close, the painting is a meditation on the relationship between the soul and body – using the reflective surface of a lake as a divider between the physical and spiritual realms. The work is partially inspired by The Fisherman and his Soul, a short story by Oscar Wilde in which a fisherman falls in love with a mermaid, and must separate from his soul in order to live with her. Fascinated by the idea of a soul having a physical manifestation, Murray used the portal-like distortions of the water to explore the relationship between the two figures in the painting; which one is real, which one reflected? 

The figure in the painting is Sunju, a musician and fellow resident on a three-month residency that Murray undertook in Bergen, Norway, in 2016. Murray has described the difficulty of wanting to work with the extraordinary landscapes she encountered there in a way that wasn’t hackneyed or overly romantic. Returning again and again to the photographs she took at the time, Murray landed on the concept of using the surface of water to explore a transition from one world to another. 

Winner of the Jackson’s Painting Prize 2020 and with work in public collections including Manchester Art Gallery following her selection for The Manchester Contemporary Art Fund in 2023, Murray uses her intricate, extraordinary skill to dissolve the scene into patterns at close range – go and see the work in person to discover its true complexity. 

Body of a Soul by Ruth Murray will be on show with The Whitaker Museum and Art Gallery (Stand 203). Ruth Murray is also exhibiting work with The Pearls (Stand 216). 

Not all beauty is derived from grandeur. This drawing by the artist Ispahani Mukah takes an ordinary street in Birmingham as its subject – and was created using the humble ballpoint pen. Mukah’s practice has its roots in his school days in Cameroon and an early fascination with line and mark-making that has evolved over time into something echoing chiaroscuro (the technique of using strong contrasts between light and dark to create a sense of solidity and volume). In Bloom of the Night, Mukah transforms pavement, parked car and street light through soft illumination.

Often using more than 20 pens for a single drawing, Mukah’s work with biro demands both physical and emotional discipline. The pens heat up as he works, the ink thickening until it must be changed or recycled. There is no room for mistakes, meaning that every mark is made with intention; the pen must stay steady over thousands of deliberate strokes. Armed with this understanding of the skill that has gone into the creation of this drawing, head to Noble and Common’s stand to see the work in person; this is a piece that rewards close looking. 

Bloom of the Night by Ispahani Mukah will be on show with Noble and Common (Stand 111). 

Colliding ‘Peugeot’ and ‘Ferrari’, this stainless steel cocktail shaker by the artist Ryan Gander comes with a suggested cocktail recipe engraved upon it. Just as the name of this limited-edition artwork is intended to playfully bridge a class divide, so too do Gander’s ingredients for ‘Auntie Deva’, a mix containing Pernod and Ricard – as well as vodka, gin, blackberry liqueur and brandy. Actually the same spirit, just with different names, Pernod and Ricard are now made by the same company; one drunk by the French agricultural working class in the south, the other by the bourgeois elite in Paris. According to Gander, the ‘Auntie Deva’ is a ‘cocktail of two halves, a good measure of prevention and lashings of envy’.

Fascinated by the creative art of mixology, Gander proposed a set of cocktail shakers – so evocative of celebration – as the basis of a new collection of limited edition artworks to mark Castlefield Gallery’s 40 year anniversary in 2024. Alongside The Peurrari, six other designs make up the series, created by Joy Division and Peter Saville CBE, Bob and Roberta Smith OBE RA, Shezad Dawood, Lindsey Mendick, Simeon Barclay and Hannah Perry. Each comes with a proposed cocktail in mind and, at Gander’s invitation, all of the designs were donated in support of the gallery. Head to Castlefield Gallery’s stand to see the full set. 

The Peurrari by Ryan Gander will be on show with Castlefield Gallery (Stand 204).

First, you see a Roy Lichtenstein-style explosion. Then, on closer inspection, the wooden panels of a door. But this artwork is not an explosion, not exactly a door – not even formed from wood, despite the grain on its surface. SLAM by the artist Emma Hart is made from ceramic, and it represents a specific moment in the artist’s life, when someone she lived with slammed a door in her face. Taking the door off its hinges, Hart drove it to her studio to cast it in a new material, a new light. 

If you go to see the work in person, you will stand in the same position Hart was in as the door was forced shut in her face. Here, she transforms it into a five-pronged shape, evoking both the angry hand that pushed the door towards her and a comic ‘bang’ symbol – drawing on violence and subversive humour at the same time. The piece sits within a new series created for The Manchester Contemporary by the artist – whose work is held in public collections including the Arts Council Collection, The Government Art Collection and the British Council Collection, and who was recently included in Great Women Sculptors by Phaidon. It appears on The Sunday Painter’s stand – one of the galleries who took part in the earliest editions of the fair. 

SLAM by Emma Hart will be on show with The Sunday Painter (Stand 211).

On the artist Tom Ireland’s website is a statement: ‘ALL WORKS ARE ONGOING.’ alternatives to violence is one such rediscovered work – begun in 2005, and returned to 20 years later, the piece has evolved, a modern context lending it new meanings. It began as a set of knives, chosen by Ireland for their aesthetic properties and bound in coloured cotton thread, a material often associated with binding or repair. The work was then packed away in an Airfix model aircraft box for storage; when the artist came back to it earlier this year, he reconsidered the box itself as something that had become part of the piece, lending its own inferences to the ideas of violence and ritual that the work explores. 

The title comes from an entryway listing at the door to Object/A Gallery in Manchester, which represented Ireland from 2015-17. It read ‘Alternatives to Violence Project’, and struck the artist as a great name for an exhibition or artwork. Having wanted to use the phrase in some way for the past decade, the artist found that it felt appropriate when considering the new iteration of this piece – now showing with Abingdon Studios Project Space at The Manchester Contemporary 2025. 

alternatives to violence by Tom Ireland will be on show with Abingdon Studios Project Space (Stand 228).