From November 12th, a collective of artists and curators will take over PINK, Stockport’s independent gallery and events space, to explore issues of memory, loss, love and belonging in the context of the family as we understand it today.

The exhibition, entitled A Soft Inheritance, brings together work by adoptees, first parents, adoptive parents and others whose lives have been shaped by adoption. Imogen DeCordova, founder of the collective behind the exhibition, believes that adoption remains a subject that is rarely given the space and complexity it deserves within the arts.

An adoptee herself, Imogen wanted to connect with other artists whose lives and practices had been touched by adoption. She gathered a group of like-minded creatives, many of whom also have personal or professional connections to adoption, to form Our Adoption Project, the team behind the exhibition.

Rather than presenting adoption as a straightforward narrative of loss or fairytale endings, the collective wanted to make space for the contradictions that exist in adoption stories and ask what might happen when adoptees, first parents and adoptive parents are invited into the same artistic conversation.

Funding from National Lottery Project Grants meant that as well as creating space for artists to showcase their work, the team have also been able to create a programme of talks and workshops that explore the modern adoption landscape. Together, the exhibition and events programme will bring people together for discussion as well as reflection, considering not only the history of adoption but also its contemporary realities.

This year is especially meaningful for Our Adoption Project, as it marks the centenary of the Adoption of Children Act (1926), a landmark piece of legislation that established the first legal framework for adoption in England and Wales.

A century on, adoption remains a profoundly significant and contested part of family life. Earlier this year, the Government apologised for historic forced adoption practices that affected an estimated 185,000 unmarried mothers and their children, primarily between 1949 and 1976. The subject was also addressed in the recent BBC documentary Stolen Babies, which described the practice as “one of the most significant human rights abuses of our times.”

For Our Adoption Project, this history forms part of an ongoing conversation about whose experiences are heard and how the consequences of decisions made decades ago can continue to shape lives today.

The project is supported by social workers, adoption support groups and academic researchers, bringing together creative practice, professional expertise and lived experience. The intention is not to provide a single answer to what adoption means, but to create a space in which its many, sometimes conflicting, stories can be heard.

At its heart, A Soft Inheritance asks visitors to think differently about the idea of family: what makes a family, what binds people together, and what remains with us after loss, questions relevant to everyone regardless of their proximity to adoption.

Visitors should expect a thought-provoking and deeply emotional experience that challenges conventional ideas about adoption, love and belonging, and invites us to reconsider how we build families today.

Founder Imogen DeCordova says: “My experiences as an adoptee and working in social care as an adult have agitated a desire to challenge personal and wider social narratives around the care system. It’s vital the conversation doesn’t remain fixed or skewed towards one, institutionalised, perspective when there are families and real people at the other end of it.

“It feels like a particularly important time to share our varying experiences of adoption and the care system and often art can offer the best tools for the job.

“From cinematic tropes of demonic children, fairytale endings or the fanfare of celebrity adoptions and an overall lack of understanding of the process as a whole- there are reductive depictions in media and minimal support available for those navigating a very complex but important path to creating a family. What about the complex stories that are set on the path towards a perceived domestic ideal in the first place?

“Working alongside a team of talented and passionate artists and advocates for this exhibition and workshop series has already been an enlightening and educational experience, and I look forward to hearing the important conversations that the exhibition and workshops spark.”

Katy Morrison, Founding Director of PINK, says: “At PINK, we are interested in art as a way of thinking through lived experience without requiring it to become neat, resolved or easily explained. Adoption can hold love and loss, belonging and estrangement, official records and subjective memory at the same time. Our role is to support artists to work from those contradictions on their own terms, without imposing a single interpretation, and to create space for audiences to encounter what emerges.”