Marc Renshaw – Nowherby Gateway

Marc Renshaw reimagines Scunthorpe’s Normanby Enterprise Park, turning its ordinary edgelands into spaces of memory and possibility through drawings, photos, and film.

A drawing practice and the exploration of edgelands are at the heart of Grimsby artist Marc Renshaw’s work. These ubiquitous spaces on the outskirts of our towns and cities provide a blank canvas for the restless mind to wander and invent new narratives.

For this project Marc focuses on Normanby Enterprise Park in Scunthorpe. A variety of businesses are at work here fuelling the town’s economy. Opaque warehouses and factories, lorries parked up, unfinished road construction, manicured landscaping. The contrast of external emptiness, and industry behind closed doors, creates a springboard for escapism and fantasy. Marc found it interesting to discover a road to nowhere covered in green moss, which took him back to the magic of childhood.

This café showcase exhibition combines drawings and photographs with an accompanying film. The photographs taken on walks around the business park are then manipulated with the app Procreate and AI, transforming the mundane reality into portals to some other distant place or memory.

Photos often serve as metaphors. The lonely traffic bollard could be me as a child standing in the mud spot at school for safety.

Business parks can look anonymous. There is euphoria in the ordinary, the potential for personal opportunity and freedom within an impersonal chunk of commerce. Normanby Enterprise Park has a sculpture marking the entrance, which features in the film. Marc Renshaw interprets this as a gateway to a place that is both everywhere and nowhere.