Category: Journal

A run of large abstract paintings, hung together in the low-beamed space at Islington Mill. These step away from the tight geometry, splattered and poured colour on paper and cloth, greens and purples and hot pinks over dark grounds, some worked as pairs. A couple are made with Kat and signed Jermyn and Kat, and one has Islington Mill painted straight across it.

It is good to have a record of the looser work as well as the printed patterns. Not everything is a repeat and a registration mark. Sometimes it is just paint thrown at a big sheet and pulled into shape, made fast and hung the same week, with someone else’s hands in it as much as mine.

The Refuge's food photography is being shot on my patterns. Oysters, macarons and cocktails styled over the pink, yellow and blue geometry, the prints working as tablecloth, backdrop and menu spread at once.

Work made for walls ends up under dessert. This is the part of commissions nobody plans: the designs get a life of their own inside the venue and turn up wherever the team finds a use for them.

The high voltage cocktail spread is the best of them. The drinks match the palette.

Part of The Palace Is a Refuge.

A sunflower wallpaper I designed and printed, installed in the boarded windows of a derelict brick building near the Mill. Bright yellow blooms filling the dark window openings of a building that had nothing behind the glass, so the flowers stand in for a view that is not there.

It is a simple, cheering thing to do to a dead building, and a bit of a sad one too. Papering over the emptiness with something that looks like summer, in the middle of a Salford winter, on a street that had mostly given up.

Part of the Islington Mill case study.

An artwork I got from Lou Woodcock, at Christmas at the Mill. She owed me for some t-shirts I had printed, and rather than money we swapped it for this, a glittered, jewelled portrait of hers, turquoise stones set around a face. There is a photo of the two of us holding it up at the party, both grinning.

Lou has since passed, and that makes the swap matter more than it did at the time. What started as squaring up a small debt over some printing is now the reason I have a piece of hers on the wall and a good photo of an evening at the Mill with her in it. Some of the best things you end up keeping arrive completely sideways like that.

A run of posters that just say I AM ENOUGH, the three words printed big over a packed background of other words, respectful, unique, brave, wise, courageous, a whole field of the things a person might need telling they are. Printed in pink-to-blue gradients across a stack of colourways, the message plain and the ground busy behind it.

It is about as direct as the work gets, a plain affirmation printed at scale so you cannot miss it. The wall of smaller words underneath does the arguing and the three big ones do the telling. Made to be pinned up somewhere you would see it every morning and, on a bad day, maybe believe it.

Halloween is Martha’s night, of course. Out on the streets of Manchester with people in light-up masks and painted faces gathered round the back, me in a top hat and a long coat leaning on the bonnet, then the whole thing rounded off with a wash at the all-night car wash.

A hearse is a costume the other 364 days of the year. On the one night everyone else is dressing up as death, she only had to turn up as herself.

Part of the Remembering Martha case study.

A hand screen-printed border run straight onto the wooden floor of Wallop, the Didsbury bar, a black Greek-key meander tracking around the edge of the boards. Printing onto a floor is a different job to printing onto paper, the surface is old and uneven and walked on, and the ink has to go down in situ, on hands and knees.

I like putting the work where it gets used rather than where it gets looked at. A border on a bar floor gets scuffed and spilled on and mopped and lived over, which is the opposite of precious, and exactly the point. It becomes part of the building instead of a thing hung on it.

Part of The Pattern Works.

By October I was putting the Saint with Flowers print in front of the mirror pieces, the laser-etched panels arranged into a radiating sun on a red wall, gold and blue diamonds fanning out behind her head like a halo made of glass.

Two bits of work that had nothing to do with each other, put together to see what happened. The halo in the print and the sunburst in the mirrors answering one another, one flat and printed, one cut into glass and catching the light differently as you moved.

Part of the Vivienne Westwood case study.

Pattern banners are hanging off the Palace itself now, long drops against the red terracotta, the clock tower lit above them.

Passing on the bus at dusk and seeing your own work on the outside of that building is a quiet, ridiculous feeling. The campaign started as anonymous paste-ups on derelict corners. It has ended up on the tower.

Part of The Palace Is a Refuge.

Launch night at the Refuge. My patterns projected huge across the arched windows, the mirror hexagons doing their thing under the party lights, Mark Ronson on the decks and half of Manchester in the building.

I spent a good part of the night with DJ Paulette, striped suit, drinks up, both of us photographing our shoes on the marble at some point for reasons that made sense at the time.

The Evening News called the bash spectacular and noted Mani was there. Months of paste and ink, and the room finally full. Worth it.

Part of The Palace Is a Refuge.