Banner for Interactive Arts: A Hand-Painted Installation for Manchester School of Art

The Brief

This piece was made for a group exhibition at Manchester School of Art, part of Manchester Metropolitan University, marking the completion of the BA (Hons) Interactive Arts course. I’d studied on the same course myself, years earlier, under Tony Eve, the course’s founder, and when the graduating cohort’s show came round, I proposed making a piece for the building’s atrium rather than showing inside the exhibition space itself.

The atrium is a full-height, glass-walled reception space that runs through the middle of the building, a place people pass through rather than a room they step into, which shaped what kind of piece could work there.

The Work

The banner carries a single line: “Don’t stop having fun because fate is a funny thing”, a quote from Tony Eve, originally said to me during a difficult moment while I was studying on the course. It’s dated 2008 on the banner itself, the year he said it.

Hand-painted directly onto fabric at a scale of several metres, floor to ceiling, and hung down through the full height of the atrium, the words that once passed between two people in private became something the whole cohort, and everyone passing through the building, walked past on their way in.

Removed from its original context and put at that scale, the line stopped being just personal advice and became something closer to a shared instruction: addressed to doubt, endurance and continuation, aimed at a room full of people at the same point of transition I’d once been at myself.

What Happened Next

The exhibition the banner was made for never opened. It was installed just as Covid-19 began to take hold, days before the UK entered its first national lockdown in March 2020.

That timing changed what the piece meant. A line about not stopping, about fate being unpredictable, installed in a building at the exact moment everyone’s plans stopped at once, it stopped being just about one course’s graduation and started speaking to something much bigger.

The building reopened once students were allowed back in, and the banner was eventually seen the way it was meant to be, as something to walk past and gather around, rather than a piece that existed only in photographs of an empty room.