Linny Venables is a multi-disciplinary artist living and working in Merseyside. Over the past few years, she has developed her practice as a socially engaged artist and has been working with communities in the Merseyside borough of Sefton. Her most recent exhibition Sweet Factory, which is currently on display at The Atkinson Gallery in Southport, reflects upon Sefton’s history of sweet making in collaboration with local communities.
Venables and I met on a sunny afternoon in November at the Atkinson, where she gave me a tour of her exhibition. It was illuminating to converse in person and to learn more about her practice, influences, key collaborators as well as about the history of sweet making in Northwest England. Venables spoke about how her interest in sweet making stems from childhood experiences such as visiting the Cadbury Cake factory in Moreton on the Wirral. She also mentioned how her work is informed by an interest in peoples’ stories and in social history, and the influences of her parents’ work (her dad was a plasterer and her mum, an antique dealer). She discussed how the similarities between glass making and sweet making inspire her most recent work, and how her art feels like a form of therapy and relaxation.
A sense of community and a commitment to community engagement are vital aspects of the exhibition. The ‘At the Library’ project, based in Bootle, Crosby and Netherton, are a partner for Sweet Factory. They provide a programme of artist-led workshops, projects, commissions and happenings in Sefton’s community libraries. As part of their 2025 programme Venables held a series of workshops which explored the similarities between glass and confectionery as well as delving into the histories of sweet making in Merseyside. Participants were able to reconnect with the area’s recent manufacturing past and childhood memories using artistic processes. Venables’ work reminds us of the contemporary realities of deindustrialization and alienation as well as the recession of the old sweet making industry. Her workshops play a concrete role in re-engaging us in traditional methods of production, craft and care and bringing people together. Overall, Sweet Factory celebrates the Sefton area’s history, community and working-class culture in a refreshing and unique way.
Disability awareness and advocacy is another significant aspect of Venables’s practice as an artist. Over the course of the exhibition, Venables is offering workshops in partnership with the disability arts organisation ‘Shape Arts’ allowing participants to explore the materials she uses in her practice in a mindful way. These workshops are influenced by Venables’ own experience of living and working as a disabled artist. Environmental awareness also informs Venables’ work. She believes in the importance of sustainability and endeavours to avoid waste in her use of materials.
A further element of Venables’s work is its tactility and its appeal to the senses. Venables’s film ‘Rock’ (2019) about the process of making Blackpool rock shows the hot sugar being melted and manipulated with colours added to the mixture before it is put in a machine to be stretched and then extruded. What comes across in the exhibition are the connections between glass making and confectionery techniques. Both involve a certain domesticity in their processes – a similarity in methods of preparation: heating, mixing, melting, cooling, transforming. To emphasise these similarities and make their processes accessible, Venables hosted a cooking workshop in Bootle Library where they made ice cream using Bootle honey and local blackberries. The pamphlet, which accompanies the exhibition, written and designed by collaborators, Niamh Riordan and Gregory Herbert, documents the artists’ multi-sensory responses to sweets. In one section, Riordan describes the experiences of the artists as ‘grown adults, lurking outside the sweet factory’ and smelling ‘The sweet metallic tang of Ribena and Chewits and Skittles with that earthy undertone that blackcurrants have’.
On entering the gallery space, the visitor is greeted with a central display of slumped glass ice cream sundae bowls in bright and pastel colours. Slumping is a technique in which items are made in a kiln by shaping glass over molds at high temperatures. The sundae bowls were made by local participants from Southport and Bootle during glassmaking workshops led by Venables at Bootle Library and the Atkinson in 2025. There are twenty-five bowls on display, all in subtly contrasting formations: individual creations of sweet desserts and cake toppings festooned with myriad shapes – flowers, leaves, swirls, curves, dots.
Venables described how the sundae bowls were decorated by the participants. The choice of materials, colours and textures for the sundae bowls was left up to the participant. Riordan writes, ‘We chop and slice small pieces of glass to decorate the bowls. We dust our pieces with sprinklings of coloured frit (powdered glass)’. Venables spoke about the atmosphere of calm and a tangible sense of collaboration that was felt during these workshops and how she values a relaxed approach to the creative process. There is a screening of a short six-minute film, a collaboration with David Linacre, entitled ‘Ice Cream Factory’ (2025) documents an ice cream making workshop at Bootle Library with archival footage from Silcock’s Pier Restaurant Ice Cream Parlour in Southport. This gives context to the history of the confectionery industry in Northern England.
The background to working class histories of sweet making is highlighted in the exhibition through material documented from National Museums Liverpool Archive. There are framed, brightly coloured photographs of reproduced posters – ‘Rhubarb and Custard’, ‘Strawberry Yogurt Flavoured Lolly’, ‘Taverners Fruity Foam’, ‘Fizzy Creepers’ from Taverners Sweet Factory, Liverpool as well as graphics from sweet wrappers and advertisements from Williams Toffee Works, Bootle and Holland Toffee, Southport, which are engaging to look at. A black and white photograph of the high boiling point department at the factory gives us additional insight into the working processes. For a short time, the Southport sweet factory was the largest toffee manufacturer in the world. Venables tells me that the design of the exhibition typeface was influenced by Mint Imperials wrappers from Williams Toffee Works in Bootle. In recent years, these factories started to decline and were eventually closed. In 2008, the Hollands Toffee Factory was demolished. In choosing to include archival material and memorabilia, Venables draws attention to the demise of these industries in the Sefton area.
The sage-green mural for Sweet Factory was designed by the artist’s sister, Sam Venables, as is another poster ‘Chewits’, replicated from a 1965 sweet wrapper, illustrating a mint-flavoured version of the sweet. Chewits were originally made in Southport, in the Holland Toffee Factory on Virginia Street. In 1997, Chewits was the eighth highest-selling sugar confectionery line in the country. The paper-wrapped, fruit chews were loved by children with their various flavours in orange, strawberry, blackcurrant and banana. My favourite pieces of the exhibition include ‘Shrimp’ (2025), a gorgeous glass sculpture which resembles a fried egg decorated with shapes of pink shrimps; these are famous pick and mix sweets and look good enough to eat. The inclusion of a grey coloured Shrimp Mould Press on display as part of the exhibition shows how the pink shrimp sweets are made. I especially admired ‘Drizzle’ (2025), ‘Glaze’ (2025), ‘Sludge’ (2022), ‘Slip’ (2022), ‘Sweet’ (2025), ‘Curl’ (2025). The sculptures are vivid and translucent concoctions with unusual shapes and textures; imperfect, undulating disc-like, colours are fused, merged and melded into pastel shades of lime, soft pink, oranges, turquoises, lilacs. Looking at them, one is reminded, to return to Riordan’s words, ‘of the ‘magic’ of sweets and of the sweet factory itself’.
Visiting Linny Venables’ Sweet Factory evoked, for me, a sense of wonder and curiosity. I felt transported back to a more innocent, colour-saturated time of childhood memories, visits to fairground rides and day trips to Northern seaside towns. What I appreciated in Venables’s work was a sense of joy in art and sweet-making as something to be shared and an alchemical use of her chosen materials – glass and sugar. The exhibition is a cornucopia of both visual and gustatory delights, which will appeal to a wide range of people of all ages and backgrounds. But underneath the playful exterior of nostalgia, there is a more serious message.
Jennifer Lee Tsai is a poet, writer and an Artist In Residence at the Bluecoat, Liverpool.
Sweet Factory is on at The Atkinson, Southport, 18 October 2025 – 25 February 2026.
This review is supported by The Atkinson.
Published 03.02.2026 by Natalie Hughes in Reviews
1,421 words