Disc Unknown brings together O’Rourke’s DVD-case paintings with larger mixed-media works, wall-based and freestanding paintings to draw viewers through a landscape of repeated motifs, images, text and materials. O’Rourke’s paintings are often inspired by happenstance, such as an overheard conversation, something seen from a bus window or a found object. Living in Manchester has shaped his experience of urban environments, leading him to use materials and imagery that echo urbanisation, labour, and the thresholds between public and private space. Repurposing found objects in his work is a response to a world already full of surplus materials, while also foregrounding tensions between the handmade and the mass-produced, the intimate and the public.

Across O’Rourke’s work, text operates simultaneously as image and language. Painted words, signage, and fragments drawn from advertising and mass media recur throughout the exhibition, forming connective threads between the presentations at Pipeline and Castlefield Gallery.