Passed through the Refuge and took ten minutes with the mirrors. The tall honeycomb panel on the grey plaster, the etched lattice catching the lights, my own reflection buried somewhere in all of it.
Work made for bars usually has a short life. Things get scuffed, rehung, painted over. These have settled in instead; the dining rooms have grown around them.
I left without telling anyone I made them, which is its own kind of satisfying.
Part of The Palace Hotel Commission.
Jeremy Corbyn holding Margot in a Bun The Tories baby grow, May 2017. We had made a few of the slogan in baby sizes, mostly as a joke, and this one ended up in the right hands at the right moment. He was good about it, took the baby, read the front and stood for the photo.
There is not much to add to a picture like this one. A leader of the opposition, a baby in a piece of gently rude merchandise, and a slogan that had started as a printed t-shirt reaching about as far up as it was ever going to reach.
Part of the Bun The Tories case study.
A day at the Manchester Transport Museum with the original plans for the line. Hand-coloured route maps and station drawings from the 1890s, the covers stamped M.S.&L.R. for the Manchester, Sheffield and Lincolnshire Railway, amended over the years in red ink.
Before drawing anything for the new station it seemed right to understand the old one. The geometry of the platforms, the way the line curved through Levenshulme, the language of the original draughtsmen.
You design better for a building when you know what it was for.
Part of the Station South case study.
First proper look at the old station. From the street it is the KK Cash and Carry, blue shutters down, buddleia growing out of the parapet. Above the shopfront, still carved into the gable, the year and the name: 1892, Levenshulme Station.
Inside, under the false ceilings and the shop fittings, there are timber vaulted roofs and parquet floors. A Victorian railway station wearing a cash and carry like a coat.
I left knowing this was going to be a long one.
Part of the Station South case study.
Down into the basement of the Refuge to install wallpaper under the arches. A darker colourway of the diamond pattern, deep browns and plums, hung behind the banquettes where the light is low and pink.
Underground rooms ask different things of a pattern. Upstairs the prints have to compete with chandeliers; down here they just have to glow a little.
Seven months after opening and the building keeps finding new walls for the work.
Part of The Palace Is a Refuge.
Postal Art, sending the work through the post as the finished thing rather than packing prints to sell. A crumpled rainbow foil piece, a foil heart, patterned card, each addressed and stamped and posted off, some as far as Canada, so the piece travels through the mail system and arrives creased and franked and handled, part artwork and part actual letter.
There is a long tradition of mail art, and it suits the way I work: make something, get it out into the world, let the world mark it. A print that goes in a frame stays perfect and stays put. One that goes in the post gets bent by a sorting machine and stamped by a stranger, and turns up at the other end better for it.
A run of new pieces, most of them a pattern of concentric rings etched so fine the whole surface reads as a ripple. I took them out into the yard at Islington Mill to photograph, and the etched glass caught the brick chimney and the sky and bent them into the rings.
The best thing about a mirror is that the work is never really finished, it keeps taking in whatever is in front of it. Held up in the Mill yard, each one filled with the tower and the trees, warped through the pattern.
Part of the Mirrors (Open House) case study.
A pattern designed, printed and installed as a pair: a big kaleidoscopic mandala printed square on the wall, and the same design cut as a circle that spins, the spinny thing. Printed in stacked layers, including a fluorescent pink pass that lifts the whole thing under the right light. There is a photo of me stood in front of it, setting the disc going.
Making a version that turns changes how a flat pattern behaves. A mandala already pulls your eye in circles, so cutting one loose to actually rotate finishes the job the drawing starts. Half print, half object, the sort of thing that only really works installed, on a wall, with someone there to give it a push.
Coming back to an older framed piece, a purple and pink triangle pattern in a heavy black frame, set up in a lit window at night. There are a couple of daft photos of me stood in front of it letting off a fire extinguisher, filling the frame with white smoke, which is either a comment on the work or just what happens when there is an extinguisher to hand.
Revisiting a piece a few years on is its own thing. You see what still holds and what you would do differently, and sometimes the most honest response to your own old work is to stand in front of it and set off a fog. It is a good pattern, though, and it earned its heavy frame.
For the 2017 show I changed tack and put paintings in the windows instead of prints. Big abstract panels, green and blue and yellow poured and worked across them, made flat on the studio floor and then stood up in the courtyard openings. You can see them here mid-make, wet on the ground, and then installed and lit.
Painting rather than printing was a different way to fill the same frames. Looser and wetter, one-off where the wallpaper repeats, but hung in exactly the same dead windows, so the courtyard kept its habit of turning its empty glass into something to look at.
Part of the Islington Mill case study.