The Space In Between: A Collaborative Photography Exhibition Coming To St George’s Hall  

Ruth Dillon and The Lifeboat community explore identity, connection and the power of telling our own stories.  

Who gets to tell our stories? And who decides how we are seen? These questions sit at the heart of The Space In Between, a collaborative photography exhibition coming to The Stable Gallery at St George’s Hall this November.  

Developed from participatory workshops led by Liverpool artist Ruth Dillon with Faye Maloney and The Lifeboat Recovery Community Hub CIC in Kirkdale, the exhibition brings together photographs and ideas shaped by the people involved. Through shared authorship, conversation and creative exploration, the project offers participants a space to create and be seen on their own terms.  

For Ruth, the exhibition grows from a longstanding interest in whose experiences are valued within cultural spaces. As a working-class artist, she has explored the tensions between privilege and exclusion, questioning who is invited to participate in cultural life  and who holds the authority to decide which stories matter.  

Her approach to socially engaged art begins with listening. Rather than arriving with a fixed idea of what participants should produce, Ruth believes collaboration should allow people to influence the direction of a project themselves.  

“Collaboration begins with listening, building relationships and being willing to adapt,”  she says. “It means allowing the people involved to shape the direction of the work  rather than inviting them into a predetermined artistic vision.” 

These concerns have informed earlier projects, including Re-Visited – Liverpool, which explored memory, place and communities’ relationships with their changing surroundings. With The Space In Between, Ruth and her collaborators turn their attention to the possibilities that emerge when people are given the freedom to explore their own ways of seeing.  

Founded by Faye Maloney, The Lifeboat supports people seeking recovery from addiction. Rooted in lived experience, the Kirkdale hub offers a welcoming place for connection, mutual understanding and belonging.  

Public discussions around addiction often focus, understandably, on harm and crisis. This project also makes room for the people finding their way towards recovery and the communities that support them, without asking anyone to be defined by their experience of substance use.  

The photography workshops began with the everyday. Using mobile phones, participants explored familiar surroundings, overlooked spaces and personal interests, experimenting with composition, perspective and visual storytelling along the way. 

The photographs emerged alongside conversations and relationships that were just as important to the process. Participants brought their own ideas and interests, allowing the work to develop collectively rather than following a predetermined narrative.  

“I didn’t want the workshops to be about asking people to disclose their experiences of  addiction, or to produce photographs that somehow illustrated recovery,” Ruth explains.  “The creative space needed to be inclusive, responsive and open to whatever people wanted to explore.”  

The resulting exhibition brings together photographs, portraits, flowers, urban spaces, fragments of language and moments that might otherwise pass unnoticed. Images  repeat, overlap and interrupt one another, creating an archive that resists a single  interpretation.  

Humour, tenderness, defiance and ambiguity run through the work. Some images are intimate; others are playful or unexpected. Together, they reflect the complexity of individual lives and the freedom to look beyond the labels often placed upon people.  

For Ruth, presenting the exhibition in St George’s Hall carries particular significance. One of Liverpool’s most prominent cultural buildings becomes a setting for perspectives that have too often been overlooked or excluded from such spaces.  

Ultimately, The Space In Between invites visitors to consider how identities are shaped, how communities support one another and what can happen when people are able to create and be recognised on their own terms.  

As Ruth puts it: “Perhaps the most meaningful thing art can do is not to speak for others,  but to make space for people to speak, create and be recognised on their own terms.” 

The Space In Between
7 November to 6 December 2026 (Launch takes place on 5 November, 5–7pm)
The Stable Gallery, St George’s Hall
Admission is free