In the Pipeline

Joe O’Rourke

A Second Body, 2026

169 × 249 cm

Disc Unknown, a solo exhibition by Joe O’Rourke, will take place across both Pipeline, London and Castlefield, Manchester this summer in a unique collaboration connecting regional practice to national visibility. 

Selected via Castlefield Gallery Associates Open-Call, Joe O'Rourke will present DVD-case paintings with large mixed-media works, wall-based and freestanding paintings, responding to both exhibition contexts.

Pipeline: Why have you chosen to present this work in advance of your upcoming exhibition 'Disc Unknown' across Pipeline, London and Castlefield Gallery, Manchester?

Joe O’Rourke: I selected ‘A Second Body’ because it points in one of the directions my work is heading since developing my ongoing series of works on DVD cases. I’ve introduced a more direct collaging approach to my process, often involving large scale printed images.

P: To what extent does it relate to the work in your upcoming exhibition?

JO: It’s a taster of what’s to come across both exhibitions, a fragmentary and fleeting sense of paint, printed image, text, and found objects shifting across multiple scales.

P: Your upcoming exhibition takes place in London and Manchester. What does it mean for a painting, or an image, to travel and be restaged in a different context?

JO: To situate my work in new contexts is a great opportunity to learn. A painting is brought into existence through my contexts, but then it is always more interesting to discover how new ideas might be suggested via its interaction with new spaces and audiences. 

P: How does this work begin to orient the viewer toward the broader environment you’re building across the two locations?

JO: I’m interested in making paintings that can do multiple, and often opposing things, at once. Painting can be porous, absorbing me and the world whilst making, then receiving the viewer and their thoughts. Painting can also be reflective, referring you back to your environment. Balancing those two experiences is what I’ll be aiming for in the exhibitions I’m building.

P: There’s a recurring sense of thresholds in your practice, between inside and outside, public and private, how is that operating here?

JO: The idea of internal and external, facade and reality, appears both in subject matter and process. There is the text ‘IN’ to the right, and a cropped ‘OUT’ to the left. There is imagery related to interior spaces - chairs, a table, a kettle, a clock, and exterior spaces - water, woodland, sky, a road sign. How these images appear is just as important- cropped, torn, fragmented, obscured. The painting itself is on the reverse of an old work, Sounds of People (2022), and some images (such as the clock) are cut and flipped from that painting. Somewhat inspired by painter Merlin James, I used the shallow depth of the back of the canvas as a space for collaging, where parts of the painting overlap and hang from the stretcher bars, whilst others slide behind them. 

P: You’ve spoken about intuition and “slow looking” in your process, how did this piece come together?

JO: There are different activities to making, and often they are best separated. For instance, the type of energy you can create through being instinctive and immediate often needs to be balanced by a different kind of energy found through reflection and looking. My paintings often become a collection of intuitive actions followed by considered responses, fed by ideas encountered throughout their making. 

In this piece, one idea was the title of a book ‘The Second Body’ by Daisy Hilyard, who writes about the idea of every physical body having a second body of global consequence. The title itself, and the space around those words, rather than the actual text, were the initial prompt for this piece.

Another spur of inspiration came a few months into making, after coming across an idea from political theorist Hannah Arendt, who likened the experience of living in the world to sitting at a table that both separates and unites us. I already had this central image of a table in the painting, but after reading this I expanded on it- pulling the left side out from the stretcher bars (increasing the painting’s width by one-third). Having to make the two sides work after this quite drastic action re-energised the painting and got it to the finish line.

P: This is a rare opportunity to present an exhibition across both Manchester and London, what significance does this hold at this stage in your practice?

JO: It is a great opportunity to present my paintings in two cities and develop new audiences. Much of my practice has developed in Manchester, and you can see this in some of the materials and motifs relating to urbanisation. I’ve shown my work a lot up here, so it is great to have my first solo exhibition in London, especially during London Gallery Weekend. I’m very interested to find out how it will be received. 

P: If Disc Unknown suggests something partially hidden or unresolved, what remains unknown for you within this body of work?

JO: I’m increasingly trying to keep my process as open-ended for as long as possble, where sections of painting, images, text, and other materials can freely circulate - a process of physical thinking. What is exciting to me is the idea of using both these exhibitions as an extension of this studio process, and the unknown outcomes they could lead to, including new possibilities for the work and how it engages with the world..

Joe O’Rourke lives and works in the Manchester, UK. He graduated with a BA in Painting from the University of Edinburgh in 2017. Recent awards include the CreaTech CoLab, University of Salford (selected artist, 2025); Waverton Art Prize (shortlisted, 2024); and the John Moores Painting Prize (prize-winner, 2018). They completed a residency at PADA Studios, Lisbon in 2021. Solo and duo exhibitions include Coming Soon, Paradise Works, Salford (2025, solo); Half Awake with Parham Ghalamdar, Bankley Gallery, Manchester (2022, duo); The Hole, Bankley Gallery, Manchester (2017, solo); and GIANTS, TENT Gallery, Edinburgh (2017, solo). Recent group exhibitions include Mezzanine Studios, London (2025); Seesaw Space, Manchester and Boisdale of Canary Wharf, London (2024); Murama Gallery, Marple; Longsight Art Space, Manchester; Make CIC, Liverpool; and Rag Gallery, Manchester (2023); as well as presentations across London, Suffolk, Salford, Swansea, and Lisbon between 2020–2022, including the John Moores Painting Prize China at Shanghai Minsheng Art Museum (2020) and the Young Contemporary Artist Award at The Biscuit Factory, Newcastle (2020).