Category: Journal

Leaving Monica Grove after fourteen years. The house stripped back to bare boards and empty rooms, the fireplaces and the bookshelves and the backyard all cleared out, everything we had filled it with gone. A little green Museumsinsel sign still screwed to one wall, left as it was.

Fourteen years is a long time in one house, most of my Manchester life, and an empty version of a place you knew full is a strange thing to stand in. This is the goodbye to it, the rooms handed back to the light, before the move up to the house on the hill. A lot of living happened here, and then, as it does, it was time to go.

See also The Monica Grove room.

See also The house on the hill.

Fuego Balear, a run of posters for a monthly Balearic jazz night, a residency with Mike Fire put on with Wine and Wallop. The look changes each time but the spirit holds: a flaming orange sun scrawled onto deep red, a hard-edged grid of Bauhaus shapes, a cleaner one with a cocktail and a target. Balearic curve balls and fire, as one of them puts it.

Balearic is a loose, sun-drunk sort of music, so the posters get to be loose and warm too, less rigid than the club stuff. A monthly night is a gift for a designer, a standing brief to keep making the same thing look different, and to keep the fire going through a Manchester winter.

See also Wine & Wallop.

A vinyl session out in Knutsford, playing records on a warm evening in a garden bar, red and blue light, people at tables among the plants. All vinyl, a pair of turntables and a bag of records, no laptop, just the slower business of mixing one record into the next by hand.

There is a particular pleasure in an all-vinyl set, the weight of the records, the risk of it, the way it makes you commit to a tune. A summer evening, a good crowd out in Cheshire, and a night of playing records the long way round.

A DJ set for a leaving party, out in a garden bar of an evening. Just the decks, a Pioneer pair, a crest flag hung behind, and a crowd in among the plants under strings of light. No design job here, no poster, just being asked to play someone off.

Playing records is the other half of what I do, and a leaving do is a good brief: a room full of people who know each other, wanting the right tunes to see someone off properly. Not everything in the archive is a print. Some of it is just a night, a pair of decks and a decent crowd.

A cycle kit designed for Station South, its own pattern printed onto jerseys and shorts, worn on a ride through Levenshulme under the garden festoon lights.

A design made to move: worn on a bike, through the streets the station sits in. Most of my work hangs on a wall or a window. This one goes past you at speed.

Part of the Station South case study.

Tabards for the Station South volunteers, made from a fabric I designed and had digitally printed, finished with reflective stripes and made to be worn while pointing people to the toilets or the bike racks.

Cut and sewn on the 1953 Singer, the same machine that stitched the Refuge canvases. Twenty pounds from a charity shop in Halifax, and still going through everything.

Part of the Station South case study.

Back at Islington Mill, years after having a studio there, and finding bits of the old life still hanging on. One of my geometric pieces still up in a window frame on the brick, an I Am Enough poster stuck by a doorway, and a hand-painted Martin Creed board propped on a pile of rubble as the place gets worked on and changed.

Ten years of my life happened in that building, so going back is never neutral. The Mill is always half building site, always becoming the next thing, and it is strange and good to see your old work weathering on somewhere that has moved on without you. Some of it is still there, doing its quiet thing on a wall.

See also Islington Mill.

Outside, the greenway that runs past the station has become its own gallery: a Welcome mural, portrait walls, a Bike and Walk sign, a rainbow path underfoot. The station is not only the building, it is the route that feeds it.

More of Paul Childs’ photographs of the finished site, the part of it that belongs to everyone whether they come inside or not.

Part of the Station South case study.

Paul Childs photographed the finished station for the Railway Heritage Trust. The Cash and Carry is gone. In its place, a café under the timber roof, a bike workshop, long tables, plants, the vaulted hall doing what it was always shaped to do: hold a lot of people and a lot of light.

Six years from that first look at the blue shutters to this. Photographs by Paul Childs.

Part of the Station South case study.

Ordering Chaos, hung at Station South. The yellow kilim-diamond pieces up on the walls, on white plaster and bare brick, plus a couple of circular versions turned into mandalas fixed up on the beams overhead. The pattern that was all over the studio floor a fortnight before, now up in the old station where people can sit under it with a drink.

It is the pay-off for the making: the same set of pieces that were leaning on a chair are now a room. Ordering chaos, more or less, the title doing what it says, a lot of bright geometry brought to order across the walls and ceiling of a bar.

See also Making Ordering Chaos.

See also Station South.