Author: Jermyn

Five years on, I found Vera’s street-art board again, still up on the boarded doorway of a derelict building. The printed wallpaper weathered but holding, the offcuts of my 3 Wise Monkeys design, a V and a heart still there in it, against the brick.

I had not expected it to last. Street work like this is meant to be temporary, up until it comes down, and most of it goes within weeks. To find this one still there half a decade later, on a building everyone else had given up on, felt like more than luck. Stood in front of it again with the years in between, which is about as much as you can ask of a thing you made for someone who has gone.

Part of the Remembering Vera case study.

A small range of products for Christmas, the bright CMYK geometry, impossible cubes and six-point stars in cyan, magenta and yellow, put onto cushions and tea towels and sold print to order. The isometric patterns suit a product like this, a repeat that reads as a clean graphic object on a plain cushion or a folded cloth.

Making things people can actually buy and use is its own discipline, different from a one-off print or a show. A pattern has to hold up small, on a soft edge, in a shop or online, and still look like the work. Made to order rather than held as stock, a modest seasonal range, the studio geometry turned into things for the house.

Part of The Pattern Works.

The van, wrapped in one69A Manchester Print and Distribution, Islington Mill, Salford. Screen printing, direct to garment, giclée, education, workshops, live printing, all of it listed down the side.

Eleven years in, and the basement record-sleeve outfit had a fleet. Well, a van.

Part of the one69A case study.

The Artvert advertising board went up at the station, carrying its own message: Wheels in Motion, with the Station South oval. I designed the board and the branding around it.

An advertising structure that funds itself by carrying art on the back. Fitting, for a station on its way to becoming a cycling hub.

Part of the Station South case study. Also relates to Artvert.

The Brexit series comes down to two made things, a tracksuit and a bag, both sewn by Needle Woman Jess from a design brief I set. The print is a Union Jack pulled out of shape, somewhere between a counterfeit designer fabric and the woven plastic of a cheap holdall, the kind of bag that carries everything a person owns from one country to the next.

Here the outfit is laid out finished, then on: a two-piece in orange and blue that reads as ordinary sportswear until you look at what the pattern is doing. The whole thing came out of wearing it in public around Manchester and watching how people reacted, less a protest than a costume put on to see what it turned up.

Part of the Brexit case study.

one69A launched a new side: DTG MCR, direct to garment. An Epson printer that prints full colour straight onto fabric, instead of screen printing one colour per screen at a time.

Screen printing is where we came from and it still does things digital cannot. But for short runs and full-colour work, printing straight onto the garment changed what one69A could offer.

Part of the one69A case study.

Before there was a working board there was a sign. The first Station South nameboard, drawn in the shape of an old railway station sign and set on a photograph of a rug by Lazerian, the artist from Denton. The earliest piece of the identity that would end up on the board.

The plan for Artvert was there from early on: an advertising board where selling space on the front would pay for artists to show work, and for local community groups to advertise, on the back. It started, as these things do, with getting the name to look right.

Part of the Artvert case study.

Branding for the M-Wagon: an MW monogram in a circle, worked up in a row of colourways, with the plain wordmark underneath. A small identity for a small vehicle, so it read as a proper thing rather than a one-off object.

The name does the work, M-Wagon for a wagon you move under your own power. Giving it a badge and a set of colours made it feel like something with a life beyond the single build, a project you could point at rather than just a trailer.

Part of the M-Wagon case study.

Martha was retired in 2020, after eight years. Eight years of being a studio, a gallery, a sound system and a merch stall, of Manchester streets and European festivals and a lot of very long drives.

This is the last photo of the two of us, parked on the street where she always parked, before she went to the graveyard. No ceremony for a car that spent her whole second life turning up at other people’s. A thirty-year-old Mercedes hearse that became an eight-year piece of work, and then reached the end of the road, which for a hearse is at least the right place to reach it.

Part of the Remembering Martha case study.

Some renders of how the station interior could look once it was done. The vaulted hall cleared and lit, the platforms turned into rooms, a café where the ticket office had been.

Renders are a way of arguing for something before it exists. When a building has been derelict this long, people need to see it finished before they believe it can be.

A picture of the future, made to help raise the money to build it.

Part of the Station South case study.