Category: Journal

My first wallpaper commission, designed, printed and installed at the 3 Wise Monkeys in Todmorden, and the first wallpaper of many. The pattern is the interlocking geometry I keep coming back to, printed up in a few colourways, deep reds and oranges, blues and yellows, and hung on the walls of the venue. It is still up there.

This was the first time the flat printed pattern went onto a wall as proper wallpaper, at room scale, rather than staying a single sheet. Getting a repeat to line up across a whole wall is a different discipline to printing one poster, and this Todmorden job was where I worked that out. The leftover roll went on to a second life later, out on the street as the board on the Vera memorial.

See also Remembering Vera.

Part of The Pattern Works.

An Easter print, a daffodil worked straight onto fabric in loose green and yellow, sitting on the carousel of the screen-printing press. Daffodils are about as Easter and as northern-spring as it gets, the first thing up when the year turns, so it made sense as the image for a seasonal one-off.

Half printed, half hand-painted, the flower drawn on in quick confident strokes with a bit of red left spattered at the foot of the cloth. Not every job was a commission. Some were just an excuse to mark the time of year and keep the press warm, and this was one of those.

A t-shirt I made for UnConvention, the music-industry festival and conference. In the photo Bill Drummond is holding it up to the room, an orange shirt with a screen-printed face across the chest. Drummond, of the KLF and a great deal else, was among the people there.

It is a small thing, a printed tee for an event, but a good one to have a photo of: the artist who once burned a million pounds, standing in a brick-walled hall holding a shirt I printed. Most of the merch I made in those years has long since gone, so it is worth something that this one got caught on camera, in the right hands.

A canvas I screen printed for Luke Una, the Manchester DJ, for the Electric Elephant festival. The image is built the way the festival feels: a pink elephant standing in front of an orange setting sun, a wall of speakers, a sailboat, a blue dolphin, a butterfly and a couple of birds, layered up in translucent inks so the colours sit over each other.

Printed onto canvas rather than paper, a one-off to mark the festival. It is a good example of the loose, layered, slightly psychedelic printing I was doing around then for music people, where the job was to catch a mood more than to sell anything.

Peter Saville holding our promo cloth, the one printed with everything one69A did: t-shirts, banners, record sleeves, bags, anything, all silk-screened by hand.

Of all the people to end up holding your marketing. A good night, and a photograph I kept.

Part of the one69A case study.

Painting and pasting up a poster for Sounds From The Other City, the Salford festival that takes over Chapel Street for the May bank holiday, done at night with my friend Fraser. A big circular design going up on a brick wall by torchlight, the two of us on ladders getting it flat before it dried.

Half the work of a poster like this is the putting up. Out in the dark on a wall in Salford, making the thing exist at the size it was meant to be seen, for a festival that has always been about the city showing itself off for a day.

Part of the Islington Mill case study.

My studio at Islington Mill in Salford, the drying racks full of screen prints and a brick wall hung with framed work. I never ran a gallery as such; I just put work up wherever there was a wall to take it, in the studio, down a corridor, anywhere it could hang and be seen.

The Mill runs through a lot of this archive because so much of it started here. A cheap room in a big old building full of other people making things, with enough spare wall between us all to keep everything on show.

Part of the Islington Mill case study.

A portrait of the two of us, Sally Gilford and me, through the arched window at the top of Islington Mill, Manchester behind us. one69A had just moved into the Mill.

We had gone from the Folk basement to a room with a view of the city we were printing for. It felt like arriving.

Part of the one69A case study.