Ten Years in a Salford Mill, 2011–2021
Islington Mill
Islington Mill is an arts complex in an old mill in Salford. For ten years, from October 2011 to October 2021, it was my base: three studios, a print room, and the place I made, showed and put up most of the work in this archive, and had a lot of very good nights. I have a tattoo of it.
The Place
Islington Mill is a big old mill in Salford turned over to artists’ studios, a gallery, a venue and a lot of people making things in the same building. Cheap rooms, thick walls, and enough going on around you that something was always happening. For a decade it was where I worked.
Three Studios
Over the ten years I had three different studios in the Mill, moving around the building as space came and went: the Corner Unit, then New Islington Mill, then the Club space. Each one was a print room, a studio and a store at once, and between them they were where nearly all of this work got made.
Walls into Galleries
I never ran a gallery there. I just put work up wherever there was a wall to take it, in the studio, down a corridor, in the exhibition space when it was going spare. The weaves, the PI3.14 pattern, the Off With Their Heads prints, all of it went up somewhere in the building before it went anywhere else.
Posters and Gigs
A lot of the Mill was music. I designed and printed the posters for gigs and helped put them on, from the Off With Their Heads nights to Martin Creed and his band, to New Year’s Eve warehouse parties with The Bug on a Void sound system, to club nights like Club Tragicana. Every one had a hand-printed poster made in the same building it happened in.
Prints and Patterns
The Mill is where the printing happened. The PI3.14 wallpaper and the fabric that backed a Shabazz Palaces shoot, the sunflower wallpaper in the derelict windows down the road, the woven pieces, the gig prints. A decade of screen printing, most of it made within a few square metres of the same floor.
The Eye
I have a tattoo of an eye that comes from the Mill. It began as part of Leigh Bowery’s face makeup, an eye we painted onto sunglasses and onto the floor of the Mill, until it turned into the thing I kept from the place. It is on me for good now.
For ten years the building was less somewhere I worked than the thing the work was made of. The eye is about the closest I can get to carrying it around.
Ten Years
Ten years is a long time to be based anywhere. The Mill was studios and prints and gigs, but mostly it was the people in it and the nights that came out of it. It is the one thing on here that is about a building rather than a single piece of work, because for a decade the building was the work.
Questions
What was your connection to Islington Mill?
I was based there for about ten years, from October 2011 to October 2021, across three studios, making, printing, showing work and helping put on gigs.
Did you run a gallery there?
No. I never ran a gallery at the Mill. I put work up on whatever walls were going, from my studio to the corridors to the exhibition space when it was free.
What is the tattoo?
An eye, taken from a piece of Leigh Bowery’s face makeup that we’d painted onto sunglasses and onto the floor of the Mill. It is the mark I kept from the place.
From the Journal
Ten Years, Entry by Entry
Dated entries from across the decade at the Mill: the posters and gigs, the prints and patterns, the shows and the parties.