One year, 52 artists and 52 different ways of looking at the world.
A year is a surprisingly useful unit of measurement. Long enough for something to develop its own character, short enough to retain a sense of momentum and, conveniently, made up of 52 weeks.
Throughout 2026, Liverpool Noise used those weeks to publish 52 poems by 52 poets. 52 for 26 began with a very simple idea: each week we would give one poet a little space and ask readers to spend some time with their work. There was no ranking and no competition, while experience, age and publication history were largely irrelevant. What mattered was the poem.
As the weeks passed, something else began to happen. Individual contributions gradually became part of a much bigger picture. Different voices, generations and experiences started sitting alongside one another. Connections appeared that nobody had planned and, taken together, the 52 poems began to say something about the extraordinary range of people who continue to make creative work.
So, for 2027, we are changing the medium.
Art 52 for 27: 52 Ways of Seeing will feature 52 visual artists across 52 weeks, creating a year-long gallery within the pages of Liverpool Noise. The principle remains reassuringly simple. One artist. One work. One week.
Painting, drawing, photography, printmaking, collage, sculpture, textiles, digital work and practices that might sit somewhere less comfortably between established definitions are all welcome. It can be a new work, or an old one. We aren’t looking for a particular style, movement or aesthetic. What interests us is the work itself and, importantly, the person who made it.
This isn’t intended as a competition, nor is it an attempt to compile some definitive list of the region’s 52 “best” artists. Art really doesn’t work like that, and trying to make it do so would rather miss the point. The title 52 Ways of Seeing gets closer to what the project is about.
Looking at art is intensely personal. A painting that leaves one person completely unmoved can stop somebody else in their tracks. An image initially dismissed in seconds can somehow remain in the memory for days. Work that appears impenetrable can suddenly reveal itself, while something seemingly straightforward can become more complicated the longer we spend with it.
And perhaps we don’t spend enough time looking anymore. Much of our visual culture now arrives on a screen and disappears almost immediately. Months of an artist’s work can be encountered between a photograph of someone’s breakfast and a video of a dog falling off a sofa. We scroll, register, perhaps tap a heart, and move on. 52 Ways of Seeing deliberately asks us to slow down.
Each week, a single artwork will sit at the centre of the project. Alongside it we will introduce the person responsible for making it and explore something of the story behind both artist and work. Why this particular piece? Where did it come from? What does it represent? And why, from everything they have made, has the artist chosen this work to introduce themselves to Liverpool Noise readers? The answers may be as different as the work.
We want established artists, but we also want people whose names many readers won’t recognise. We want artists at the beginning of their careers alongside those who have been making work for decades. Formal training isn’t a requirement. Neither is gallery representation, an exhibition history or a lengthy CV.
Someone emerging from an MA programme might appear one week; someone who rediscovered painting in middle age could appear the next. A photographer might be followed by a sculptor, a printmaker by a painter. The differences aren’t something the project needs to overcome. They are precisely what should make it interesting.
Liverpool and the wider region have always contained remarkable creative communities, but inevitably only a fraction of the work being made finds its way into galleries, reviews or arts coverage. 52 Ways of Seeing won’t attempt to solve that, but it can open another window. And for one week, one artist gets that window.
By the end of 2027, those individual encounters should have become something else: an archive of 52 works and 52 artists, capturing a small part of the visual culture being made around us at a particular moment in time.
One lesson from 52 for 26 is that the simplest ideas often work best when the groundwork is done early. We therefore want to find our 52 artists before the project begins, rather than spend the year chasing the next contribution. It means artists can think properly about the work they want to put forward and we can build a programme that remains varied and surprising from January through to December.
So the search for our 52 starts now…If you make visual art and the idea appeals to you, we’d like to hear from you. Equally, if you know somebody whose work deserves a wider audience, point them in our direction.
There are no prizes and no league table. You don’t need to convince us that you are the next big thing. The ambition is much simpler than that: 52 artists, 52 works and an entire year in which to give each of them a little time and attention.
Then, in January 2027, we start showing. One artist at a time. One artwork at a time. One week at a time.
By December 2027, we might just have created something rather special: not a list of artists to watch, but a portrait of a creative community told through 52 individual ways of seeing.
Interested in taking part in 52 Ways of Seeing? Email Art52LiverpoolNoise@icloud.com and we’ll send you full details and the artist submission template. But please note – we aim to conclude the submission process by Monday 30 November 2026.
