Category: Journal

Then papering the space. The printed squares went up across the walls, tiled edge to edge so the mandala pattern carried around the room and down onto the floor as one surface. Not over bare brick, wallpaper will not hold on brick, but across the finished walls of the unit.

Photographed at night from the Northern Quarter street, the shopfront glowing pink against the dark with the Green Fish sign across the road. An empty unit turned into somewhere that looked like it had always been a shop.

Part of the SWAG Christmas Shop case study.

Every year I make Christmas presents for my family, and things to sell alongside them. In 2015 that folded into SWAG, an artist-led Christmas shop a collective was opening in the Northern Quarter for the two months before Christmas.

I was given a space in it and, with it, a prominent window. The starting point was a pattern: a run of kaleidoscopic designs, mandalas built out of smaller marks, screen-printed by hand in pinks and oranges and a deeper blue and green. My wallpaper is never on rolls, it is printed onto 400mm squares of paper, tiled up to make the pattern. The same design then carried across onto the things I made to sell.

Part of the SWAG Christmas Shop case study.

The winning entries from the Manchester Bee design competition, gathered onto one screen-printed poster. Everyone had drawn their own bee, and the best of them got printed up together in the house yellow, grey and black, a whole swarm of different hands and styles on a single sheet with the One69A mark at the foot.

This is the other end of the bee invite, the party over and the entries in. A competition like that is really an excuse to get a room full of people drawing and printing, and the poster is the record of it: dozens of bees, no two alike, all pulled through the same few screens on the same night, under the One69A banner.

See also The bee invite.

Part of one69A.

The first of the mirrors. Old mirror glass set into reclaimed timber frames, the wood still carrying its red paint, the silver backing eaten away in patches to leave an image floating in the glass.

I had been working out a way to draw into a mirror without drawing on it, taking the picture out of the reflective layer itself so it only shows when the light and your angle are right.

These early ones are rough, the frames salvaged, the images half there. A start.

Part of the Mirrors (Open House) case study.

October 2015, the Conservative Party conference in Manchester, and the Bun The Tories banner out on the march that met it. Thousands of people down past the town hall, red flags and smoke, and the three words carried through the middle of it on a bedsheet.

This is the shirt-and-sticker idea grown into something you could hold above a crowd. The same slogan that started behind a pair of decks, now doing its job at the front of a demonstration, printed big enough to read from clear across the road.

Part of the Bun The Tories case study.

A big screen print of the universe, made for a group show. I took a deep-space image, all nebula cloud and scattered stars, pulled it apart into halftone dots and printed it back up large on paper, both as a square and as a circle. Close up it is just a grid of coloured dots. Step back and the whole cosmos reassembles out of them.

It is the same halftone approach as the Jimmy Jesus prints, but turned on something with no edges and no argument, just colour and depth. Printing the universe by hand, one dot screen at a time, is a decent way to spend a week, and it hung well in the show, glowing off the wall.

An invite I designed and hand screen printed for the sixth birthday of One69A, run as a Manchester Bee design competition and screen-printing party at Islington Mill. The invite is a die-cut hexagon that opens out into a honeycomb concertina, printed in yellow, grey and gold, with a different screen-printed bee on each panel and the brief tucked inside.

It is one of the more involved printed objects I have made, the folding and die-cutting as much of the job as the printing itself. A bee for Manchester, a honeycomb for the fold, an invite that is already a small exhibition of the thing it is asking people to make. The party ran at the Mill with printing demos, and the best bee designs got printed up on the night.

See also The winning bees.

Part of one69A.

Martha in Switzerland, parked up with a wall of peaks behind her, just after coming through the Mont Blanc tunnel from Italy. This was one of the European trips, out with the Dub Smugglers Sound System, whose merchandise I printed and sold. I would go over to help at the festivals, and Martha would end up parked outside the gigs as the merch stall.

She toured further than a thirty-year-old hearse has any right to. Driving her that far was half the work, the artwork and the transport at once, the piece and the way the piece got to the next place.

Part of the Remembering Martha case study.

The first Bun The Tories shirt, worn out DJing in the summer of 2015. Just the three words in black on white, printed to see whether the joke landed before it became anything bigger. Bun is Manchester and Caribbean slang for getting rid of something, aimed here at a government most of the people I knew had not voted for.

It started at a pair of decks, one printed tee, and grew into stickers, badges, bunting and a lot more shirts. BuzzFeed picked it up, I gave the stickers away free to anyone who registered to vote, and any profit from what sold went to charity. Humour and circulation rather than protest, something you would actually wear that did its arguing by being seen.

Part of the Bun The Tories case study.

A pizza box I designed and printed for a competition run by PLY, the Northern Quarter bar. The design is a spiralling geometric field in pink, yellow and blue with PLY dropped out of the middle, printed straight onto a real takeaway box. It won: PLY put it up on their wall among all the other entries and posted that it had been picked as the winner by Scott’s Pizza Tours.

The good part is where it ended up. Scott Wiener, who judged it, holds the Guinness World Record for the largest collection of pizza boxes in the world, so the box is now somewhere in that collection over in New York. A one-off print job that turned into a small piece of a world record.