After a hugely successful launch for the open air ‘Faces and Threads’ exhibition on ‘The Corner’ Pocket Sculpture Park, we moved into a period of instability and upheaval rather than the usual process of reflection and examination that generally occurs post-installation/Launch.

The exhibition features the work of Parham Ghalamdar, made at workshops in collaboration with members of the community here in Hunslet, South Leeds. The work is sited on a piece of land that BasementArtsProject rescued from abandonment at the hands of a multi-national land banking company several years ago, and therefore bears a definite connection to the concept behind ‘Faces and Threads.

The exhibition was launched on Thursday 9th July amidst the scorched grass of the third major heatwave of 2026. After a speech by Dr Lone Sorensen, Poet Rick Holland and ambient techno/trance band FURU performed a thirty minute set, the dry dust swirling around our feet as we walked around the site to view the work. The feeling was one of a mini festival, especially for the homeless resident of a tent that had turned up on the site a couple of days before we installed the paintings.

Tent encampments, comprising a mixture of the genuinely homeless, drug dealers, prostitutes and assorted hangers-on have been a constant issue on this site for the last eighteen months as the police and council have closed down local trap houses. It was the presence of this tent that became the source of the aforementioned instability, upheaval and ultimately destruction that followed the launch. Whilst it took four months to deal with the anti-social behaviour last year, this year it took two weeks but not until criminal damage had been done.

The workshops in South Leeds attracted an interesting assortment of characters, some of whom were artists and students from recent exhibitions at BasementArtsProject, others came from the local community and included a local Reform candidate. All of the candidates for the local elections, at that point less than a week away, had been invited on the understanding that they could not talk politics, only climate. Most did not acknowledge the invitation. The responses I did get indicated suspicion from one candidate, an apology for not being able to attend from another, one participant and deafening silence from all other quarters. I talk about this seemingly negative aspect to make the point as to how people engage, or more often than not, fail to engage with such matters around climate change.

For the exhibition launch all council members from across Leeds were invited, for which we received two ‘I hope to make it’ messages and no actual attendees. The evening was attended by 37 people from the local and Leeds art community who stayed for the majority of the evening, whilst many people who were passing on Tunstall Road stopped to watch from the street. A number of people who stayed were people from the community who we had never met before. Communication was difficult as they were Lithuanian and Russian and spoke almost no English but they were happy to avail themselves of the pakora, bhajis, spring rolls, falafel, crisps and soft drinks that I handed around. Due to the presence of alcoholics on ‘The Corner’, we tend to keep events on the land dry, only serving alcohol from the house and garden to those attending that we know do not have issues around drink.

The audience was a good mix of those from the surrounding area and a good number from the Leeds art and educational scene. The subject of climate was ever present, not only in the visuals of the tarot cards depicted in the artwork but in the ever increasing heat of the summer. At the time of writing this, many things have happened relating to this project, some good, some less good, but more on that in future posts, but suffice it to say that we are currently leaving our fifth major heatwave of 2026. It has been quite a number of years since we have been able to call our summer temperatures unprecedented. After two months of drought conditions, wildfires and hosepipe bans across much of the UK we have another heatwave predicted for September. Around the world bombs are still dropping, the ever increasing number of data centres are hoovering up large amounts of our drinkable water, and golf courses and private schools are still able to water their courses/lawns despite the hosepipe bans currently restricting those with gardens the size of postage stamps.