Our Adoption Project-Art Exhibition + Workshops
Greater Manchester, United Kingdom
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Aim
We're fundraising for Our Adoption Project- Art exhibition and Workshop series taking place in November in Greater Manchester.
What does it mean to make a family?
How is your identity shaped by the state intervening in who brings you up?
What can artistic depictions of adoption tell us about our attitudes towards it?
We are a collective of artists and curators with lived experience of adoption taking over PINK, Stockport’s independent gallery and events space, to explore issues of memory, loss, love and belonging in the context of Adoption.
Our Adoption Project
Our Adoption Project is a multi-disciplinary arts exhibition and programme of creative workshops showcasing artists whose lives and practices have been touched by adoption. Visitors should expect a thought-provoking and deeply emotional experience that challenges conventional ideas about adoption, love and belonging, and invites us to reconsider how we build families today.
Launching this autumn at PINK Stockport, Greater Manchester.
What's the money for?
We're fundraising...
-For venue hire for both gallery spaces at PINK.
-To subsidise travel and expenses for our incredible team and volunteers who are dedicating their spare time and resources to put the exhibition on for free.
-For core exhibition materials.
-To rent the Talkaoke table from The People Speak and to pay for host facilitation training for our 'Conversations' series.
-To pay for optional professional therapeutic support and after care for participants in our workshops and conversation series (attendees will include adoptees, first families who have experienced child removal and those with lived experience of the care system).
-To keep the exhibition and workshops completely free for all attendees.
Please keep an eye on our website and instagram for updated information about our team, workshop series, safeguarding and ethical framework and other FAQs about our artist Open Call.
For further information regarding the exhibition, programme of talks and workshops, or bios of individual artists, please contact [email protected]
More info about Our Adoption Project
We are a collective of artists and curators with lived experience of adoption taking over PINK, Stockport’s independent gallery and events space, to explore issues of memory, loss, love and belonging in the context of Adoption.
The project is split into two stands: a multi-disciplinary exhibition gathering together work from artists touched by adoption; and a programme of talks and workshops that explores the modern adoption landscape.
The exhibition, entitled A Soft Inheritance, brings together work by adoptees, first parents, adoptive parents and others whose lives have been shaped by adoption. Through sound works, visual art and other creative practices, the exhibition explores what is created, what is lost and what endures through the process of adoption.
Rather than presenting adoption as a straightforward narrative of loss or fairytale endings, A Soft Inheritance makes space for the contradictions that exist in adoption stories and asks what might happen when adoptees, first parents and adoptive parents are invited into the same artistic space.
A space for conversation
The exhibition is complemented by a series of talks and workshops delivered by creatives and professionals with links to adoption. Together, the exhibition and events programme will create a space for discussion as well as reflection, considering not only the history of adoption but also its contemporary realities, including identity, trauma, cultural displacement and the continuing impact of adoption across generations.
Talkaoke
In order to facilitate respectful and insightful conversation throughout the exhibition we hope to incorporate Talkaoke (pronounced like 'karaoke') -the spontaneous, interactive, non-hierarchical talk show format devised by The People Speak Art Collective which that has toured festivals, conferences, high streets and galleries all over the UK and Europe for the past 29 years and has inspired us in countless ways.
Alongside using Talkaoke as a conversation tool our team are devising a selection of creative workshops to go alongside the exhibition.
We will be creating a combination of shared spaces and also dedicated spaces for adoptees only and first families only to engage in peer-led, open conversations about the exhibition. We shall share more information about these workshops in October.
Why now?
This year is an especially fitting one to deliver Our Adoption Project, as it marks the centenary of the Adoption of Children Act (1926), a landmark piece of legislation that established the first legal framework for adoption in England and Wales.
A century on, adoption remains a profoundly significant and contested part of family life. Earlier this year, the Government apologised for historic forced adoption practices that affected an estimated 185,000 unmarried mothers and their children, primarily between 1949 and 1976. The subject was also addressed in the recent BBC documentary Stolen Babies, which described the practice as “one of the most significant human rights abuses of our times.”
For Our Adoption Project, this history forms part of an ongoing conversation about whose experiences are heard and how the consequences of decisions made decades ago can continue to shape lives today.
The intention is not to provide a single answer to what adoption means, but to create a space in which its many, sometimes conflicting, stories can be heard.
At its heart, Our Adoption Project asks visitors to think differently about the idea of family: what makes a family, what binds people together, and what remains with us after loss, questions relevant to everyone regardless of their proximity to adoption.
Visitors should expect a thought-provoking and deeply emotional experience that challenges conventional ideas about adoption, love and belonging, and invites us to reconsider how we build families today.
What inspired Our Adoption Project?
The project is supported by adoptees, social workers, adoption support groups and academic researchers, bringing together creative practice, professional expertise and lived experience.
Founder Imogen says: “My experiences as an adoptee and working in social care as an adult have agitated a desire to challenge personal and wider social narratives around the care system. It's vital the conversation doesn't remain fixed or skewed towards one, institutionalised, perspective when there are families and real people at the other end of it.
“It feels like a particularly important time to share our varying experiences of adoption and the care system and often art can offer the best tools for the job.
“From cinematic tropes of demonic children, fairytale endings or the fanfare of celebrity adoptions and an overall lack of understanding of the process as a whole- there are reductive depictions in media and minimal support available for those navigating a very complex but important path to creating a family. What about the complex stories that are set on the path towards a perceived domestic ideal in the first place?
“Working alongside a team of talented and passionate artists and advocates for this exhibition and workshop series has already been an enlightening and educational experience, and is only just getting started.”
Producer Lucy Tomlinson says: “The aim of the exhibition is to challenge traditional narratives surrounding adoption and instead explore the complexity of this life-changing process. We have seen exhibitions from other adoptee-led collectives in other countries but we believe this is the first to bring together art by adoptees and put it in conversation with art by adoptive parents or first parents to create a true multiplicity of perspectives.”
Our Adoption Project: A Soft Inheritance will launch at PINK, Hilton House, Stockport, SK1 3NA on Thursday 12th November 2026. The exhibition is open to the public Friday 13 - More information about the artists involved will be available closer to the date at ouradoptionproject.com
About the venue
PINK is an independent, artist-led arts organisation based in Stockport. Its mission is to give artists the time, space and resources to make, present and sustain their work. PINK's commitment to creativity as a means of understanding lived experience aligns with Our Adoption Project’s exploration of the complexities of adoption.
Katy Morrison, Founding Director of PINK, says: “At PINK, we are interested in art as a way of thinking through lived experience without requiring it to become neat, resolved or easily explained. Adoption can hold love and loss, belonging and estrangement, official records and subjective memory at the same time. Our role is to support artists to work from those contradictions on their own terms, without imposing a single interpretation, and to create space for audiences to encounter what emerges.”
What's the money for?
We're fundraising...
-For venue hire for both gallery spaces at PINK.
-To subsidise travel and expenses for our incredible team and volunteers who are dedicating their spare time and resources to put the exhibition on for free.
-For core exhibition materials.
-To rent the Talkaoke table from The People Speak and to pay for host facilitation training for our 'Conversations' series.
-To pay for optional professional therapeutic support and after care for participants in our workshops and conversation series (attendees will include adoptees, first families who have experienced child removal and those with lived experience of the care system).
-To keep the exhibition and workshops completely free for all attendees.
Please keep an eye on our website and instagram for updated information about our team, workshop series, safeguarding and ethical framework and other FAQs about our artist Open Call.
For further information regarding the exhibition, programme of talks and workshops, or bios of individual artists, please contact [email protected]
Funding method
Keep what you raise – this project will receive all pledges made by 11th November 2026 at 11:00pm