Author: Jermyn

Resisting Reality, a sculptural piece made for a group show, a knotted tangle of wire and beads sitting on a mirror inside a glass case, out on an OSB plinth in the open air. The green label prices it at a hundred and fifty pounds and files it under Life. It is one of the more three-dimensional things I have shown, the pattern lifted off the page and wound into a knot.

I did not start out as an artist. I began at university doing electronics engineering, came out with an HND in it, and only then decided that what I actually wanted to do was make things. A piece like this, all wire and connection and stubborn tangle, is not far off an electronics problem anyway, just one with no right answer and no circuit to complete.

The painted box is doing its job. People stop, look, and arrange themselves in front of it. Hotel guests with luggage, strangers mid-conversation, someone posing against the spiral while their friend finds the angle.

Nobody asked them to. That was the point of painting the hoarding instead of leaving it grey: give the room something to stand next to. I photographed a few of them photographing it. The box has a public life of its own now.

Part of The Palace Hotel Commission.

A t-shirt printed with a single word, Habits, over a ghost of a print in the fabric, which I wore on the Saturday of Glastonbury, the best day I have had. Afterwards I framed it, mud and all, so it hangs as a piece rather than going back in a drawer, the shirt kept exactly as the day left it.

Some things are worth stopping and framing. It is a plain shirt with one word on it, but it carries a whole day, so putting it behind glass felt right, halfway between an artwork and a keepsake. There is a photo of it up on the wall next to a wire giraffe, which is about the right company for it.

Four days painting the hoarding in reception with Jude Wainwright. Three faces, three designs: a colour-step spiral, squares inside squares, a radial burst. The designs were built on screen, then translated by hand, colour by colour, up the ladder and down again.

By the end our hands were more paint than skin. Guests wandered past at all hours and the box became a photo stop before it was even finished.

It was a plain grey lump on Sunday. By Wednesday it was the loudest thing in the room, in a building that takes some competing with.

Part of The Palace Hotel Commission.

Making on the way down to Glastonbury. Somewhere on the road there are pictures of a little arrangement of wildflowers laid onto a green board with a printed border and set down on the tarmac, a telegraph pole studded with hundreds of old staples and a hand-painted number eight, and me in the passenger seat with a flower in my teeth.

None of it is a commission or a piece for a show. It is just the habit of making things wherever you are, turning a lay-by and a handful of flowers into something worth photographing on the way to a festival. The work does not switch off because you have left the studio, and this is what it looks like when it comes out on a road trip.

Two days with Pantone books at the Palace, then a cutting mat full of swatches back at the studio. Colours held against terracotta, glazed tiles, marble, oak. Some fall straight out. Others sit right.

Paint mixed and lined up on the rack: pinks, teals, deep blues, a plum. The palette has to hold its own inside an interior that ornate without shouting at it. Swatch grids taped down, crossed out, rearranged.

Slow, unglamorous work that decides everything that follows.

Part of The Palace Hotel Commission.

Back at the Palace to measure up. In the middle of reception, under the stained glass dome, there is a large grey hoarding, and whatever it is hiding stays hidden.

I measured panels and photographed everything else: the Refuge Assurance lettering over the entrance, the monogram worked into the iron gates, the marble floor, the calla lilies on the desk. The building was an insurance headquarters before it was a hotel, and the word Refuge is carved into it more than once. The new bar is taking its name back off the walls.

The job for now: make this grey box worth looking at until it can come down.

Part of The Palace Hotel Commission.

A new set of prints in the courtyard windows the next year, red and blue geometric patterns this time, run big and set into the same openings. Some face into the yard and some out onto the street, so the gallery worked both ways, for the people sitting in the courtyard and for anyone walking past outside.

The pattern against the old brick is the whole thing. A tight, bright, repeating design dropped into a rough industrial window, the Salford tower blocks behind it, doing the job a stained-glass window does in a church, only printed and temporary and about nothing holy at all.

Part of the Islington Mill case study.

Three days after the first Palace meeting, I tried lino cutting for the first time. A monogram, RV, for A Re Volt at the Palace. First pulls in black on white, then layered tests in yellow, blue and red, one colour over another until the letters started to vibrate.

Rough and quick, and in the end not the right mark. It went no further. The medium did. The posters that later carried this campaign across Manchester all started here: first attempt, wrong idea, right tool.

Part of The Palace Hotel Commission.

First meeting at the Palace Hotel on Oxford Road, about artwork for the bar taking shape inside. They are calling it the Refuge. The reception is still a building site. Hi-vis, surveying kit, a vast boarded wall waiting for something. The terracotta columns and arches are something else, even half wrapped.

My notebook filled up fast: small bags, posters, pavement art, a tour of the building and, near the bottom, a bronze horse. There is a phrase in there too, from Luke Una, that stuck the moment I heard it. A Re Volt at the Palace.

I walked out with a list as long as my arm and the feeling this would take over the summer.

Part of The Palace Hotel Commission.