Testing block printing on fabric. A geometric repeat, pink triangles around teal squares, pulled by hand onto a piece of cotton.
The registration wanders and the ink is uneven in places, which is really the point of a test. You learn where the pressure needs to be and how much ink the block wants to hold.
This was me working out whether it was worth doing properly. The block drawn up on the computer was the other end of the same question, whether to make the blocks by machine or by hand.
Deb and I got married, and went via Levenshulme Station on the way, the two of us and Vesta the dog in front of a mural I painted there.
This is the working train station, not Station South, still carrying trains through Levenshulme, which felt right for a day about going somewhere together.
Of all the places to stop for a photograph.
Part of the Levenshulme Station Mural.
Step On, a poster for an indie disco: Manchester, Britpop and indie classics through the ages. The Gallagher brothers stare out of it in black and white, boxed in yellow and pink hazard stripes, the name in that bruised Madchester lettering. Chorley’s first indie night, at Rileys Taproom and Wine Bar, a Thursday in September, free in.
The brief writes itself with a night like this: it has to look like the music, so it borrows the whole visual language of the era, the stripes, the swagger, the two most famous brothers in the city. A poster that tells you exactly what you are walking into before you have read a word of it.
Two coasters I came across going back through the archive. They were made for Refuge, by Volta, one carrying the wordmark and one a geometric print.
I had forgotten I still had them. Small printed things like these tend to outlast the night they were made for. There is more on the Refuge work here.
Moderate Sounds, a poster for my own night of eclectic selections, Sunday the seventh of July. The design is a set of bold eye shapes, red, teal and grey lenses and a rising sun over a mustard-yellow ground, with the name set below in a chunky hand. A record night that needed a face, so I gave it one out of the studio shapes.
Moderate Sounds is just me playing what I like, across the board, and the poster is drawn to say exactly that, open, warm and a bit strange, the same eye motif looking out from every version. A standing night gets a standing look, and this is it.
Flowers made out of fabric, for the flower show at Tatton. The print is one of mine, the same isometric blocks that turn up across a lot of my work, here in pink, green and orange.
I cut the petals from it, gathered them and built them up into flowers. Bright and geometric and a bit unnatural, which felt right for a show garden that was never trying to copy the countryside.
A small making job that sat alongside the Station South garden at the same show.
A mural on the front of the Bike Station at Station South, a geometric bicycle built from segments of colour across the black shutters. Bright enough to read from across the road, simple enough to become a landmark.
Painted directly onto the working shutters, so it disappears when the shop opens and reappears when it closes. A sign that is only whole when the place is shut.
Part of the Station South case study.
Protest, Pattern and Party, a show of fifteen years of making, hung across the brick and beams of Wallop in Knutsford. Fifteen years of work on the walls at once, the political prints and the Off With Their Heads poster, the kilim-pattern pieces and the wallpapers, the Manchester Bee, the Jimmy Jesus panels, the Superman capes and the Palace pieces, all under warm light in a room full of people on the opening night.
The title is the practice, more or less. Protest, pattern and party are the three things I keep coming back to, and this was the first time they all shared a room and a night. Fifteen years is long enough to see what holds together, and hanging it all at once in a busy bar with a crowd in felt like the right way to mark it, less a retrospective than a party with the work up on the walls.
See also Framing fifteen years.
Getting the work ready for Protest, Pattern and Party, a show marking fifteen years of making, at Wallop in Knutsford. This is the fortnight of framing, pulling fifteen years out of drawers and off walls and putting it all behind glass. The political prints, the Off With Their Heads poster, the Manchester Bee, the Jimmy Jesus panels, the kilim-pattern needlepoints, the Superman capes and the SOLD prints, all lined up on the floor waiting for frames.
Fifteen years is a lot of work to gather in one place. Framing it up like this is the first time a lot of these pieces have sat next to each other, and you start to see the three threads the show is named for running through all of it, the protest, the pattern and the party. A whole practice, boxed and glazed and ready to hang.
See also Protest, Pattern & Party.
A group show of record sleeves at Station South, printers and labels together, framed up the stairwell on the brick and terracotta walls. My sleeves are in among them, ones I printed years ago while I was at One69A, hung next to everybody else’s, a whole staircase of screen-printed covers.
A show like this is a good reminder that the record sleeve is where a lot of print and music people first meet. Seeing my old One69A covers framed and up on a wall, in a converted railway station, alongside a room full of other printers, is a nice way for that early work to come back round.
See also Station South.
See also one69A.