Author: Jermyn

Cheddar Gorgeous at the 25th Life Ball, on the red carpet at the Wiener Rathaus in Vienna, wearing the finished outfit. The cream headdress from the studio now part of a full look, gold and pale and enormous, exactly where it was built to be.

This is the pay-off for the work, seeing it out in Vienna on the person it was made for, in front of that crowd, on that carpet. A thing made in a Salford studio, worn to a ball in a European city hall, which is a good distance for a costume to travel.

Part of the Cheddar Gorgeous case study.

Working with Cheddar on a new piece for the Life Ball in Vienna, a huge spiked headdress in cream, radiating off the head in dozens of fine points. Made in the studio at the Mill, tried on and adjusted, the shape worked out on the person who would wear it.

The Life Ball is a big AIDS charity ball at the Vienna city hall, about as grand a stage as this kind of thing gets. Building something to be seen at that scale meant going big and sharp, a white starburst you could pick out of a crowd from across a ballroom.

Part of the Cheddar Gorgeous case study.

A street party in Hulme in the summer of 2018, Bun The Tories bunting strung over the decks. By this point the slogan had its own set of red and black flags, and they came out for the kind of thing they were always meant for: a sound system in the road and half the street out in the sun.

Somewhere in here is a small person in a Bun The Tories shirt being carried through the crowd, which is roughly where the whole thing was aimed. Not at a rally but at an ordinary good day, the politics worn lightly enough to bring along to a party.

Part of the Bun The Tories case study.

FOMO installed at the Lowry, out at Salford Quays, for the Week 53 festival. The finished mirror hung in the orange corridors of the building, part of Create 53, a partnership between the Lowry and Islington Mill that put Mill artists into the gallery. You walk up, see yourself, and read the FOMO text etched over your own face.

The wall label put it plainly: fifteen years on the party scene, mid-thirties now, an ever-growing to-do list, and the question of whether to slow down or keep trying to keep up. A mirror is the right object for that, the one surface that always shows you exactly where you are while you worry about being somewhere else.

Part of the The Mirror Works case study.

Making FOMO, a mirror etched with everything I was worried about missing. The design is text, thirty-five years old, missing out, and a list of the festivals and cities you are supposed to have been to. I laser-etched it into the back of a real glass mirror, burning the protective covering off in the shape of the words.

Then the chemistry: a solution of vinegar, salt and hydrogen peroxide worked over the exposed back, eating away the copper behind the glass wherever the covering had gone, until the text came clear and you could see straight through it. The same method as the Open House mirrors, done here in the backyard, so the finished thing shows your reflection through a screen of low-level panic about not doing enough.

Part of the The Mirror Works case study.

The roof came first. Scaffolding up the frontage, chimneys repointed brick by brick, the interiors stripped back to their bones. Slow, unglamorous, structural work, the kind that has to happen before anything visible can.

The Manchester Evening News ran a spread, All change at Levenshulme South, and the three of us who started the station stood outside in hard hats for the photograph.

A hundred and twenty-six years of weather to undo before we could begin.

Part of the Station South case study.

Jody Hartley came to photograph the station properly while it was still the Cash and Carry. The frontage in the snow, the roof trusses above the shop floor, the greenway running dark under the railway bridge.

Good photographs of a building before it changes are worth having. In a few years none of this will look the same, the blue shutters and the fluorescent strip lights gone.

A record of the before. Photographs by Jody Hartley.

Part of the Station South case study.

A one69A open studio: the doors open, the presses running, the place full of people watching prints get pulled and having a go themselves.

For a print shop that spent most of its life head-down on other people's jobs, a night of showing the work and the room it was made in. Packed, loud, ink everywhere.

This is what the studio was actually like when it was full.

Part of the one69A case study.

The last of the courtyard installs, a new wallpaper print in a bright tartan-like grid, red and blue and yellow, set into the windows in the middle of a Salford winter with snow on the ground. Designed and hand-printed like the rest, and put up in the cold.

Four years of this by now, a new design in the same windows each time, the courtyard treated like a gallery that changed its show. A plaid pattern glowing out of a boarded window on a grey, frozen day, which is about the most a bit of printed paper can do for a place.

Part of the Islington Mill case study.

A run up to the Isle of Arran in the winter. Martha parked on the grass in front of Lochranza Castle, the ruin and the hills and the cold sea light, then down at the harbour with the ferry and a low sun coming off the water.

She was made for this as much as for the city, a long empty road and somewhere to point her at the end of it. Eight years in and still good for a trip to Scotland and back.

Part of the Remembering Martha case study.