Author: Jermyn

Cheddar Gorgeous, the Manchester drag artist, wearing a geometric headdress made from my work, with face makeup to match, out for New Year’s Eve at the Refuge. A spiked burst of red, yellow and black shapes built up off the head, the Moderate Realism look pushed off the wall and onto a person.

It is one of my favourite ways for the work to end up, worn by someone who knows exactly what to do with it. Flat geometry turned into a costume, on a performer who wears it better than anyone, on the one night of the year built for going all out.

Part of the Cheddar Gorgeous case study.

Afterwards Jody Hartley photographed the pieces properly, against a plain white wall, away from the noise of the opening.

Shot like this you can see the range of them, the concentric rings, the isometric line drawings that read like folded rooms, the older portrait mirrors in their salvaged red frames.

His photographs are the clearest record of the body of work as a set, before the pieces went their separate ways. A show in a living room only exists for one evening, and these are most of what is left of it.

Part of the Mirrors (Open House) case study.

I painted the living room white and turned it into a gallery for one night. Open House, my own name for it, nothing to do with the festival, just the idea of showing the work at home rather than carrying it to a gallery.

The mirror pieces went up around the room and on the chimney breast, a DJ set going in the corner, people moving through the house with drinks, catching themselves in the glass as they passed. Half exhibition, half party, which is how I like a room to work.

The mirrors did the rest, holding the street outside and the room inside at the same time.

Part of the Mirrors (Open House) case study.

Finding and framing the first screen print I ever made, the one from the basement of Folk back in 2009, dug back out and put behind glass in an ornate gold frame. After years of it being just a rough early thing kicking around, it finally got treated as what it is: the start of everything, worth keeping properly.

There is something right about framing the first one up, years and hundreds of prints later. It went from a fanzine job pulled in a cellar to a piece on the wall, not because the printing got any better but because of everything that came after it. The oldest thing in the archive, given the best frame in the house.

See also The first screen print.

A paint jam at Leake Street, the legal graffiti tunnel under Waterloo station in London, in the summer of 2017. Rather than match the lettering and characters filling the tunnel that day, I painted a high-contrast op-art mural, all geometry and no illustration, to stand apart by being the odd one out.

It started as a design on a screen and ended up sprayed across a wall in a tunnel full of other people’s work, me sitting in front of the finished thing. It has long since been painted over, which is the deal at Leake Street, where nothing lasts and that is the point of it.

Part of the Waterloo Paint Jam case study.

Andrew Weatherall, one of my heroes, photographed in front of my Refuge wallpaper. Black and white, mid-set, the diamond pattern reading like a backdrop made for him.

This one is not my photograph. It was shot at a Zutekh night and carries the photographer's mark, L|K, so the credit is theirs. I am just glad it exists.

You make a pattern for a bar, and then Weatherall stands in front of it. Of all the people to end up framed by that wallpaper.

Part of The Palace Is a Refuge.

The Booth Centre in Manchester, where a good part of the Bun The Tories money went. Selling the shirts raised over three and a half thousand pounds, and it went to homelessness charities, this one among them. Here is their 2017 mosaic on the wall, the art room, and the building itself off Angel Meadow.

It mattered that the joke paid for something. A slogan about getting rid of a government that was, among other things, presiding over more people sleeping rough, turned into shirts, turned into money, and turned up here. The least a bit of merchandise can do is leave some good behind it.

Part of the Bun The Tories case study.

Painting the Levenshulme mural on the station wall, up a ladder in a respirator with the spray cans, the big pink and blue and yellow letters going on over a few days. The station and the market carrying on around it while the wall slowly turned into the town’s name.

A bee landed on my hand partway through and sat there long enough to photograph, which felt about right for a mural about the place it was in. This one was for Levenshulme and for the people who use the station, painted where everyone waiting for a train would see it.

Part of the Levenshulme Station Mural case study.

The design for the Levenshulme Station mural, the town’s name set in tall blue and yellow letters on a hot pink ground, worked up on screen and then mocked up against the station wall to check it at size.

It is a simple idea done big: the place name, spelled out in a bold hand-drawn face, sized to fill the wall and read from the platform and the street. This was the stage of getting the letters and the colours right before a drop of paint went near the actual wall.

Part of the Levenshulme Station Mural case study.

An exhibition in a bar in Alicante, out in Spain. Framed prints of the rose-window designs, circular segments of red, yellow and blue like stained glass, hung along the walls, with sheets of the smaller stamp-grid prints and a circular disc laid out on a terracotta patio in the sun.

Getting the work shown abroad, in a different light and a different kind of room, is worth doing. The rose-window pieces suit the Spanish sun, all that saturated colour, and hanging them in a bar where people are drinking and talking rather than in a white gallery is the same instinct as printing on a bar floor: put the work where the life is.