Fifth install, a long billboard-sized run of the blue and tan pattern on Norman Road, bus lane traffic for an audience, Martha parked with her boot open on the corner.
Someone posted it within hours: work by Moderate Realism in Manchester, with support from The Refuge. The campaign now has a public author, which was always the plan for this half of it.
Four days to opening. Two installs to go. My pasting arm has opinions.
Part of The Palace Is a Refuge.
Between installs, the same patterns are going onto fabric. Pink and yellow diamonds with fine blue linework, printed square by square at one69A, edges left raw for stretching.
These are for inside the Refuge, the exhibition half of the project. The street gets paper and paste; the bar gets cloth and stretcher bars. Same language, different rooms.
Part of The Palace Is a Refuge.
Rain on the cobbles in Castlefield and pattern going up on the viaduct brickwork. Orange and green cubes under a hundred and fifty years of soot, the canal flat and dark behind, the panels doubling in the puddles.
Of all the sites so far this one feels most like a conversation with the city: Victorian engineering, hand printed paper, nobody around but geese.
A small plaque went up beside it. Quietly official. Let people wonder.
Part of The Palace Is a Refuge.
Install three of the Refuge campaign went up in Levenshulme, the yellow cube pattern pasted onto the bricked-up windows of shops around the village. At the time it was just another site in the nine-day run.
It turned out to be the one that mattered most. Someone connected to a derelict station nearby saw the wallpaper, and that led to a conversation, and the conversation led to Station South. A guerrilla paste-up on a boarded window, and a building I would still be working on eight years later.
You never know which piece of work is the door.
Part of the Station South case study. Also relates to Moderate Realism.
Second install, pink and blue diamonds over the doorways of a sandstone block near the old fire station on London Road. The campaign asks one thing of the city: take your photo in front of the wallpaper.
And people do. Selfies, portraits, a woman posing with her shopping, a lad against the pattern like it is an album cover. None of them know what it is advertising. That is the point.
Boards prepped at the studio again, screwed up in minutes, Martha ferrying them across town. She is becoming the campaign's unofficial support vehicle.
Part of The Palace Is a Refuge.
First wallpaper install, after dark, on the boarded windows of the old Roadhouse on Newton Street. The orange and green pattern wraps a dead corner of the Northern Quarter and the To Let signs suddenly look like part of the composition.
The method is built for speed. Each panel gets pasted onto boards at the studio during the day, so the street work is just a drill and screws. Minutes at each site, not hours. Martha did the carrying, tailgate up, boot full of finished boards.
One down. Eight to go before the doors open. Nobody has been told what any of it is for.
Part of The Palace Is a Refuge.
The three lino blocks together on the studio bench for the first time. A Re Volt at the Palace. The Palace Is a Refuge. The Refuge, Come As You Are.
Read in order they tell the whole story: provocation, explanation, invitation. Each one cut by hand, each carrying the same date, all of it started by a monogram in May that went nowhere.
Four editions from three blocks, and a city currently wallpapered in the first two sentences.
Part of The Palace Is a Refuge.
THE PALACE IS A REFUGE in white ink on bus shelter glass, printed on the spot with the record box kit, the trees and the towers of town reading through the letters.
The whole print shop fits in a 7 inch case: screen, ink, squeegee. Set down, print, gone before anyone asks questions.
Printing on glass means the message changes with whatever stands behind it: a bike rack, a bin lorry, a blue sky. No two readings the same. The city does half the design work.
Part of The Palace Is a Refuge.
Second design, third edition. THE PALACE IS A REFUGE, yellow letters over a purple ground, 14.09.16, number 003. The phrase is Luke Una's again and it does two jobs at once: names the venue and answers the question the first posters raised.
Best of all, some of these are pasted within sight of the building itself, the Palace tower and its clock rising behind the hoarding.
The campaign is now a conversation across the city between three sentences.
Part of The Palace Is a Refuge.
The box has a new skin. Mirrored hexagons set into the painted faces, the pattern tight in the middle and dissolving towards the edges, so the whole of that reception now happens twice. The stained glass dome, the arches, the people: all of it lands on the work and comes back.
A black plaque with a gold roundel went up alongside. Moderate Realism, it reads. Two evenings of fitting, checking reflections, refitting.
At night, under the lights, the box stops being an object and becomes a lens.
Part of The Palace Hotel Commission.