Friday 7 February - Sunday 30 March 2025
'I seek to find beauty, visual interest and celebration in the everyday, the overlooked and the ordinary'
- Mandy Payne
Mandy Payne is a Sheffield based artist working in paint and print, whose work explores the urban environment and everyday scenes. She is particularly interested in issues of gentrification, social housing, and Brutalist architecture as a symbol of the contradictions of utopian and dystopian worlds.
For 13 years, her work focused on Park Hill, the Grade II* listed Brutalist Sheffield council estate and one of Britain’s largest examples of Brutalist architecture, now undergoing regeneration. More recently she has turned her attention to similar sites and buildings in London, the North West and the North East, documenting the transience of the urban landscape and the loss of many of these mid-century buildings and their existing communities.
'It was the un-refurbished parts of Park Hill that I found most inspiring, where the memories and layers of the past were almost tangible. I wanted to document the estate in transition and also for the work to speak of the loss and displacement of the existing communities' - Mandy Payne
She works with materials that have a direct connection to the sites she depicts, namely concrete and spray paint and occasionally marble, referencing the perceived inequalities of different building materials. She casts concrete into small canvases to work on directly, using paints and micro masking tapes to build up flat zones of colour and then oil painting for fine detail finishing. More recently, she has been working on large and lighter, custom made glass fibre reinforced panels to increase the scale of her work. Mandy has also investigated the same subject in print and in 2015 was awarded a 2 year Fellowship to learn stone lithography at Leicester Print Workshop.
Artist Biography
Mandy Payne originally trained as a dentist, working in the Hospital and Community Dental Services before changing career to work as a full-time artist. She graduated with BA Fine Art (First Class) from Nottingham University in 2013.
Recent group exhibitions include Royal Academy Summer Exhibition, London where she has exhibited on 9 occasions; John Moores Painting Prize, Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool, 2014, (Prize Winner) and shortlisted again in 2016 and 2020. ’Made In Britain’, National Museum in Gdansk, (2019); ‘Contemporary Masters From Britain; 80 British Painters of the 21st Century’, Nanjing and Yantai China, (2017); the Contemporary British Painting Prize, (London and Huddersfield, 2016) and the New Light Art Prize (2015) First Prize Winner (Bowes Museum and London).
Solo exhibitions include: Angear Gallery, Lakeside Arts Centre Nottingham (2018); Huddersfield Art Gallery (2019); Manchester Modernist Society (2021), and Art At Home, London (2024). Mandy is a member of the Contemporary British Painting group.
Her work is held in a number of public and private collections including The Devonshire Collection, Chatsworth, The Yale Centre For British Art; Yantai Art Museum, China; University of Nottingham, Ningbo, China; Elizabeth Greenshields Foundation, Canada; Priseman-Seabrook Collection, U.K; Ruskin Collection, Millennium Gallery, Sheffield; University of Salford Art Collection and the New Light Art Collection, U.K.
Mandy Payne's exhibition at Stapleford Granary contains around 20 original paintings of London, Manchester, Liverpool, Sheffield and the North, created over the past 5 years. It also includes 11 stone lithographs of which 7 focus on the Park Hill Estate.