Author: Jermyn

A set of woven abstract works shown at Islington Mill, made by cutting printed and painted sheets into strips and weaving them back together into a grid. Close up they are a mess of pink and green and yellow squares; from across the room they settle into something like a bright, broken tartan.

Hung as big panels on the wall, three or four across, they turn a flat process into something with real depth. Weaving is an old, patient way of making an image, and doing it at this scale, out of my own prints, felt like the right kind of slow.

Part of the Islington Mill case study.

DJing out of the back of Martha at the art car boot at Islington Mill. The deck where a coffin would go turned into a DJ booth, records and a mixer set up on the runners, me sitting in the back with my feet hanging out and a brew going.

This is Martha doing the thing she was best at, being a venue that could park anywhere. A sound system on wheels with the tailgate up and a crowd forming around the back of a hearse, which is not a sentence most vehicles get to be part of.

Part of the Remembering Martha case study.

A record sleeve for Ruf Dug's Island, a green lizard on plain brown board, screen-printed at one69A. Simple, two or three colours, the kind of sleeve that looks better the cheaper the materials.

The music side never really went away. Record sleeves were where one69A started, back with Balearic Mike, and they kept coming back, one twelve-inch at a time.

Part of the one69A case study.

PI3.14 shown at Islington Mill, the printed panels hung under the brick arches, the pattern going from flat design to something you could walk up to and lose your focus in. The same repeat at wall scale, lit so the op-art effect really moves.

There was a bag as well, run up from the offcuts of the fabric, the pattern folded down to something you could carry out of the show. One design taken from wallpaper to exhibition to a tote in the space of a few months.

Part of the Islington Mill case study.

A couple of pictures from the studio at Islington Mill. A windowsill lined with old tins and pots of screen-printing ink, every colour mixed and half-used, with the Manchester tower blocks standing up through the window behind them. And a bit of the room itself, a painted pipe running down the wall, marked and dripped on from years of work.

No finished piece here, just the place the work comes out of. The Mill studio was as much a part of the practice as any print, and it is worth having a few photos of it as it actually was, ink-stained and full of half-finished colour, with the city right there outside the glass.

A fiftieth birthday card I made for my aunty. The front is a Moderate Realism print, the interlocking geometric pattern in full colour, with a die-cut fifty and happy birthday worked into it, and a small M-R, MCR mark on the back like a proper edition.

Not everything gets made for a client or a show. This was a one-off for family, run off on the studio press and posted down to her. It is a nice example of the pattern doing an ordinary job, a birthday card, but made properly, printed and finished the same way as work that ends up on a gallery wall.

A big one. A series of screen-printed posters of Manchester landmarks, the Hacienda, Oxford Road and more, illustrated by Stan Chow with Studio DB, printed by one69A for Forever Manchester.

Bold, geometric, dozens of designs pulled by hand in edition after edition. Weeks of printing, the drying racks never empty.

Seeing the whole city rendered in flat colour and stacked up in the studio is one of my favourite memories of the place.

Part of the one69A case study.

The PI3.14 pattern printed onto fabric and hung as a backdrop for a shoot with Shabazz Palaces, the Seattle group, when they came through Manchester. The whole wall of pattern behind them, the busy geometry doing the work a plain studio wall never could.

It is a good use for a print like this, as a set rather than a picture. Something to stand a person in front of so the pattern reads as depth and movement around them, turning a bit of screen-printed cloth into a room.

Part of the Islington Mill case study.

The Moderate Courtyard Gallery was the courtyard at Islington Mill, or rather what I did to it. I filled the empty window openings of the buildings around it with my own printed patterns, big panels of hand-printed geometric wallpaper set into the brick, and put a name on the door. A gallery made out of a yard, its walls the backs of the mill.

It was the same instinct as everywhere else at the Mill, work up on whatever surface would take it, only here the surface was a whole courtyard of dead windows. Picnic tables, plants, the hearse parked up, and a ring of bright pattern where there had been boarded glass. People came out and sat in it.

Part of the Islington Mill case study.

PI3.14, a pattern I designed and screen-printed as wallpaper. Interlocking circles and triangles built up into a dense op-art field, run in a stack of colourways from full spectrum to silver-grey, until the repeat starts to shimmer and buckle when you look at it straight on.

It was another test of one design pushed as far as it would go, printed big enough to paper a wall and tight enough to read as pure pattern. The kind of thing that stops sitting still the longer you stand in front of it.

Part of the Islington Mill case study.