Stuck Up: Bad Apple

Location: Leeds Arts University, Blenheim Walk, Leeds LS2 9AQ

This exhibition is available to view from 10:00am - 4:00pm Monday to Friday by appointment only for external visitors. Please email curatorial@leeds-art.ac.uk to make an appointment. Staff and students are not required to make an appointment.

'Stuck Up: Bad Apple' by MA Fine Art student William Burroughs looks to a familiar graphic form - the fruit sticker. Across his varied practice, which involves experimental music, performance, zine-making and more, Burroughs is drawn conceptually to the mundane and the overlooked, to medium- and format-specificity, and to the democratising potential of accessible forms of artmaking. In Stuck Up: Bad Apple these interests come together in Burroughs' appropriation of the humble fruit sticker: "a temporary nuisance, peeled, cast away, forgotten about..."

"Stuck Up: Bad Apple" displays hundreds of mass-produced and newly commissioned fruit sticker designs, in the first iteration of an evolving exhibition and archive project. Contributors* were invited to respond to the fruit sticker format however they saw fit. Burroughs intends for future iterations of the project to build on and extend its scope and ambition. Conceived as an experiment in what Burroughs terms "post-utility", Stuck Up blurs the lines between form, format, medium and function.

Located on the Basement level behind the Blenheim Walk Gallery, B Gallery is one of several ancillary exhibition spaces across Leeds Arts University, and part of the University's diverse public programme. Since 2022 it has also been embedded in the MA Fine Art course as an ongoing series of collaborative curatorial experiments between staff and students, exploring creative-critical pedagogies, the materialisation of research, and the shifting figure of the artist-curator. From January to June 2025, B Gallery presents three exhibitions co-curated by MA Fine Art students in dialogue with Senior Lecturer Dr. David Steans and Associate Professor Marianna Tsionki. The three exhibitions were programmed via a live brief, for which students were invited to propose curatorial responses to a 'pre-existing collection or archive' relevant to their practice.

'Stuck Up: Bad Apple' contributors: Katy Austin, Leonard Baske, Kelly Bishop, Tracy Burroughs, William Burroughs, Thomas Carroll, Rosie Durant, Emma Falconer, Peter Gates, Lili Ghane, Theo Gowans, HEOVERS, Tallulah Howarth, Daniel Jefferies, Max Lamdin, Rhea Lempert, lulaf0rtune, Rosalind Murray, Poppy O'Brien, Marilyn Ramsden, David Steans, Pippa Turner-Rowe, Julia Woolf, Brad Wright, Emmy Yeadon.