I guess it’s been a couple of decades now that I have been calling into Liam Spencer’s studio in the Rossendale Valley for a brew and a chat. Of course during those years we have talked about his art, his now stellar representation of urban landscapes fashioned from pure colour in economical brush strokes. This time we talked the Irwell. Or at least Liam did.

 

Liam has a long physical connection with the Irwell. He studied fine art at Manchester Poly, before taking a studio in Hanover Mill on the banks of the Medlock – an Irwell tributary. Subsequently he moved house and lived by the Irwell on the outskirts of Rawtenstall and then further up the valley to where he could see Higher Bridge Clough – another headwater of the Irwell – from his kitchen window. This Clough, as small tributaries are called, converges with the Irwell at appropriately named Waterfoot, where Liam’s studio is.

 

The 39 miles of the Irwell served an industrialisation of water and steam, now tracking the decline of the industrial revolution with a crumbling collection of mills. One, which Liam has painted, preserved only in its solitary chimney on the river bank. The Irwell was once known as ‘the hardest worked river in the world’ and had a reputation for being the dirtiest in the UK. Liam told me that he used to look out of his Manchester studio on to the Medlock and fantasise about seeing fish. “Just before I left and the building was demolished I did see a fish. It wasn’t a trout, but at least it was a fish!”

 

It is no surprise then that Liam, over the decades, has tracked nature returning to abandoned industrial sites along the Irwell. “Nature has moved into these ‘brownfield’ sites which are now arguably better for biodiversity than much of what we know as the countryside.”

 

And during more recent years he has taken to studying, drawing and painting not only the landscape, but the wildlife moving back in. “The Irwell is a beacon of hope and testament to the ability of nature to recover when it is allowed to do so.” He has also photographed this returning diaspora in both still and moving images.

 

In an (almost) complete departure from his usual exhibitions, Liam has assembled a combination of painting, drawing, photography and film for the Whitaker gallery and museum in Rawtenstall. But as an added creative context, film will be projected onto selected pieces in the Whitaker’s permanent collection of taxidermy. I’ve seen the films and demonstrations of the haunting and ethereal effect of this. 

 

“I guess this project has been ten years in the making,” Liam told me, “and the concept has evolved throughout those years. Many of the abandoned sites – what were cotton mills, paper mills, dye works - along the Irwell are now country parks and nature reserves. Historically my work has been focused on urban landscapes. This project aims to bring the natural history of the region together with my urban painting and drawing.” 

 

Liam showed me a quote by Arthur Ransome (author of Swallows and Amazons) in the Manchester Guardian from 1926: ‘Something may some day be done to restore the dead, murdered rivers like the Irwell to the life that man has taken from them. The river will cease to be a sewer and the day will come when men stop in crossing a bridge in Manchester to see the trout feeding below it.’

 

Liam’s spotting of a fish in the Irwell decades ago was the start of a good news environmental story when nature is under increasing pressure. Trout, kingfishers, even reliable sightings of otters are amongst a huge variety of Irwell wildlife to be found today. His multimedia exhibition is, therefore, appropriately named ‘Afterlife’ and charts his observations of a river rising from dirt, dereliction and decay. 

 

Afterlife runs at the Whitaker in Rawtenstall from December 22nd until February 19th.