Today I’m delighted to be talking to artists Sophy King and John-Paul Brown about their major new exhibition The Guardians of Living Matter at The Lowry in Salford, currently on show until 29th March 2026.
Sophy King is a multidisciplinary environmental artist whose work interrogates the nature–culture continuum through installation, film, and sound to examine ecological systems under the pressure of climate crisis. Her research across the moors and lowlands surrounding Manchester focuses on moss, fungi, peat, wildfire, and water—both as material and subject—probing our entanglement with damaged landscapes while proposing urban rewilding and sustainable futures.
John-Paul Browns practice spans large-scale installation, documentary photography, expanded drawing, and painting. His work layers personal narrative with geopolitical and environmental realities, combining material sensitivity with environmentally conscious production methods. Like King, his commitment to low-carbon practice is not an add-on but a structural principle—shaping both aesthetics and ethics.
Together they present this fabulous, ambitious multimedia exhibition unfolding across four galleries.
At the centre of the exhibition is a vast, multi-sensory, immersive installation that explores a hope inducing speculative future: a living sculpture where mycelium and AI co-exist, a fictional research lab containing factual research, new ambitious large scale bodies of work and a delicious mixture of entangled logics and imagined possibilities for fungal and artificial systems.
Instagram: @sophykingart
Website: www.sophyking.com
Instagram: @johnpaulbrown_
Website: www.johnpaulbrown.com
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