Category: Journal

Three years on, the Westwood idea turned into prints. Three compositions, each built from her image and a piece of England: Saint with Flowers, her face behind a halo with a rose held up to it; Cannon Portrait, a figure set against a gun barrel and a Gothic tower; and Throne in the Peak District, a seated figure in a green valley with a stack of things balanced on his head.

These are the first digital test prints, pulled to check the colour and the halftone before committing to a run. Rough proofs on loose paper, taped up and photographed.

Part of the Vivienne Westwood case study.

Once the paintings had dried I started taking rubbings from them. Cloth and paper laid over the raised paint, then worked until the texture lifted back off the surface as a ghost of the original.

The paint was thick enough to print itself. What had been five canvases began to multiply, the same circling image carried across onto fabric, softer and flatter than the paintings but unmistakably out of them.

There are a few short films of this from the same day, the cloth going down and coming back marked.

Part of the David Bowie case study.

A wallpaper design drawn from Islamic geometry, the interlocking stars and eight-point rosettes that repeat forever without a centre. I printed it up across a run of colourways, red and blue on cream, a busier version in yellow and red, the same tessellation reading quiet or loud depending on the inks.

Islamic pattern is where a lot of my geometry comes from in the first place, the discipline of a shape that locks into itself and carries on in every direction. Printing it by hand, screen by screen, colour over colour, is a way of learning how the old patterns are built by having to build one myself.

Part of The Pattern Works.

The process, worked out over a few cold nights in the yard. Laser-etch the pattern into the mirror’s protective backing, then lay the glass flat and pour on a mix of hydrogen peroxide, salt and white vinegar. The solution eats through the exposed silver and copper and stops where the backing protects it, so the image comes up out of the mirror in reverse.

It has to be done outside, the fumes are not something you want in a room. A photograph of one lying on a pallet at night, the portrait surfacing as the metal lifts.

Part of the Mirrors (Open House) case study.

David Bowie died on 10 January 2016. That evening I stayed in the studio and painted. Not to make a body of work, just to do something with the news rather than sit with it.

Five canvases came out of that night and the days around it. Each one is the same gesture repeated, a wide circling motion returned to again and again until the paint stands off the surface, thick and wet, greens and pinks and yellows piled into a rough spiral.

They were still drying on the studio floor the next morning. I had not planned any of it. It was just where the evening went.

Part of the David Bowie case study.

The gig night turned into an exhibition too. A red screen print of the pope on board, and a Justin Bieber memorial fridge, a fridge door made into a little candlelit shrine with Bieber’s face printed on it and records stacked underneath.

It was the same spirit as the posters, print and irreverence in about equal measure. A pope and a pop star, both given the full votive treatment, both hung in a mill as if that was the obvious thing to do with them.

Part of the Islington Mill case study.

The Kath Kidston on Acid wallpaper, left out in the yard to rot. Pinned to a back wall behind an old bike and a wicker chair, the bright pattern going soft and mouldering in the Manchester damp.

There is something right about a homeware print ending up like this, the cheerful domestic thing left out in the weather until it falls apart. The pattern was always about pushing that mass-market prettiness somewhere odd, and this is about as far as it got.

Part of the Kath Kidston on Acid case study.

The window was the part I had been given to fill, and I built an installation in it rather than a display. Wallpaper behind, a Christmas tree, a pink rocking horse, a framed mirror piece hung in the glass, all of it lit so it glowed onto the Northern Quarter pavement at night with SWAG lettered across the front.

A shop window at Christmas is its own small stage. This one was less about the products and more about stopping someone on a cold street long enough to come in, and to make the whole thing feel warm from the outside looking in.

Part of the SWAG Christmas Shop case study.

For the changing room I made curtains. A different pattern from the walls, geometric this time, triangles and halftone in orange, pink and slate, designed, hand-printed and then sewn into a full-length drape.

It hung as the changing room, the one part of the shop you went behind rather than looked at. I like that the making went all the way down to the practical things, the curtain you pull to try something on, printed and sewn with the same care as the work on the walls.

Part of the SWAG Christmas Shop case study.

Then the stock. A table’s worth of things carrying the printed patterns and older designs: old prints pulled back out, pieces I had made for the Manchester bee competition at one69A, and new items made especially for Christmas.

A shop needs filling, and it was a chance to put a lot of ideas out at once and see which ones people picked up. Print on paper, on cotton, on a bag someone actually carried home, the same handful of designs turned into as many objects as I could make them into.

Part of the SWAG Christmas Shop case study.