Dates: 22 August – 26 September 2026
Open: Saturdays and Sundays 12pm – 6pm
Where: Robinwood Mill (Find Us)
Artists: Roya Claire Potter, Aliyah Hussain, Dale Holmes, Kiya Major, John Powell Jones, John Newton, Lucy Atherton, Tom Crompton.
CRAG 2 at 9a includes other Calderdale contributions from poet Maggie O’Sullivan, writer and academic Douglas Field and the late Jeff Nuttall (1933-2004) painter, poet, writer, musician, performer, teacher, publisher, sculptor, ceramicist, actor – and former resident of Todmorden.
The past lingers in these valleys, things settle, percolate and resurface.
CRAG 2 at 9a is the result of a conversation about place, Todmorden. About the way generations of artists slip into orbit around the Calder Valley towns, and the kind of resonances that form over time.
The several artists that show work together at CRAG 2 are a loose association, drawn to the experimental and the energies that emerge when different practices sit side-by-side. The work they present is expansive, stretching across painting, writing, poetry, audio, textiles, digital, ceramic, performance, music.
This range carries a blend of the comic, the visceral and a sense of the edge, where things break down, revert and recombine. Paint, video games, voices, soft sculptures, language, rituals, tufted rugs, things fashioned in clay and bodies in shelters listening. The work on show is not a response to the original CRAG. It’s an incidental association that feels suddenly present, and keenly appropriate to the moment we are in.
Jeff Nuttall came of age with the emergence of the Cold War and The Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND). Fear of planetary obliteration and mutually assured destruction was palpable, instigating a way of being captured in his phrase ‘the psychopathic now’. It’s a phrase that resonates with our current ‘now’ as we move into the climate crisis.
Lucy Atherton. ‘A phone call from a counsellor in a graveyard’. John Newton, Vessels, 2025-6.
Where did CRAG come from?
Whilst teaching at Huddersfield University and searching through a plan chest for collage material for his students, Dale Holmes discovered an old black and white poster from the 1980s. It was an exhibition by CRAG (Calder Rural Art Group). Seven unidentified figures positioned on the Bridestones above Todmorden. The landscape instantly recognisable but the artists indistinct, unidentified. This poster became the prompt for an experiment, a new iteration – CRAG 2. In 2024, several artists and writers orbiting Calderdale began exhibiting together as CRAG 2. The show was held in Dale and Roy’s gallery space in Todmorden. It took the form of relay exhibitions over six weeks showing the artists Lucy Atherton, Dale Holmes, John Powell-Jones, Kiya Major, John Newton and Roy Claire Potter overlapping two at a time. For CRAG2 at 9a we are welcoming artist Aliyah Hussein and poet Tom Crompton.
Dales’ borrowing from an old poster soon became a collaboration with the past as Kelly Loughlin 9a unearthed a press clipping from an original CRAG show listing the artists involved. The list included two poets, identified as intermittent members of CRAG, Maggie O’Sullivan and Jeff Nuttall.
CRAG 2 at 9a welcomes intermittent frequencies and presences. The exhibition includes a landscape painting by Jeff Nuttall and Tom Crompton reads poetry by Maggie O’Sullivan. There’s also a public talk by Douglas Field, co-editor with Jay Jeff Jones of the 2019 edition of Jeff Nuttall’s Bomb Culture (first published 1968).
9a 