Category: Journal

Getting the work ready for Ordering Chaos, a show at Station South. The pieces are yellow kilim diamonds, needlepoint-look geometry in yellow, red and black, framed up in black borders, big ones and a run of small ones laid out on the studio floor. The poster sets the tone: Ordering Chaos, Station South, Moderate Realism, opening on the first of February.

The title is about right for the work and the room it goes in. Bright, ordered pattern made in a bit of a mess, then hung in a converted railway station. There is a globe in a few of the shots, which somehow belongs, the whole world and a stack of yellow diamonds waiting to go up.

See also Ordering Chaos.

See also Station South.

A poster for a Ruf Dug set at Station South, Friday 24th June, free entry. Ruf Dug is a Manchester DJ, and the design is all sharp geometry: a pink diamond dropped into a field of yellow, green and white zig-zag rays, the information stacked down the middle. Built to read fast on a wall or a phone.

Designing for a night is its own discipline, one image doing all the work of telling you who, where and when, with enough of a look that you would go on the strength of the poster alone. The studio geometry put to work selling a Friday night at the old station.

See also Station South.

Jazz 2 Jungle, a night at Station South I play and make the artwork for. The design leans on the name: a full-colour poster with a classic Mercedes and Mike Fire on it, and a hand-drawn J2J logo in acid pink and yellow, the sound of the night, jazz sliding into jungle, put into a graphic. There is a photo of me behind the decks in the old station too, records out, big windows behind.

It runs in editions, and there is a special one here for the Jubilee weekend, Jazz 2 Jungle number three, lettered by hand with a wonky crown over an acid-house ground. Making the poster and playing the set is the whole job in one, the design and the night feeding each other.

Two more from the night: the decks set up in the main room before the doors opened, and me behind them once it had started.

See also Station South.

Glitch artwork, the geometric patterns pushed through a digital process until they break. The clean repeats, concentric circles and halftone diamonds, get pulled apart and smeared, blocks sliding out of register, the pattern glitching like a bad signal, in the cyan, magenta and hot pink of a screen rather than an ink.

It is the opposite move to the hand-printed work, letting the machine damage the pattern instead of pulling it clean by hand. Same geometry underneath, run through a filter that corrupts it on purpose, so the thing that usually locks together comes apart in an interesting way.

The opening night of Station South, the old Levenshulme railway station brought back as a bar and venue. These are the proper photographs, by Jody Hartley: the room packed out, the founders lined up outside the brick frontage under a Full Steam Ahead billboard, a Station South nameboard with food laid on, and the street outside with the building lit up.

Station South is a big part of what I do now, and being in the room on the first night, with the place finally open and full, was a good one. A railway station that sat empty, turned back into somewhere the neighbourhood comes to, which is about the best thing an old building can do.

See also Station South.

Putting up the Station South sign with my dad. It is a proper enamel railway nameboard, black with white lettering, the kind that would have named a platform, and we fixed it to the brick above the door off a ladder. There is a shot from inside too, looking down the stairwell with me holding it, working out the fixings.

Some jobs are better with your dad on the other end of the ladder. Station South is a converted railway station, so a nameboard over the door is exactly right, and hanging it is one of those small making jobs that ends up meaning more than the size of it, the two of us getting a heavy old sign level on a wall.

See also Station South.

With the shop gone and the false ceilings down, the station finally looked like itself. The glazed lantern roof running the length of the hall, the arched openings, the white brick, light pouring in where it had not for decades.

Empty, it is one of the most beautiful rooms in Levenshulme. Standing in it, you can see every version of what it might become at once.

The hard part starts now.

Part of the Station South case study.

Back at the Refuge with Deb, five years after the opening. The mirror hexagons are still up. The menu she is reading is still covered in my pink diamond pattern.

I photographed her against the mirror wall, then we sat and read menus printed with something I made in a rush in 2016, which is a strange kind of time travel.

No discount, incidentally. I checked.

Part of The Palace Is a Refuge.

A van turned into a mobile art studio and office. I lined the inside with my own wallpaper, the bright cube-and-diamond geometry, fitted a fold-out desk, shelves of books and tubs of paint, a plant, and a diamond mirror set into the patterned wall. A whole working studio you can park anywhere and open the back doors on.

It is the logical end of always wanting the work out in the world rather than shut in one room. Instead of a fixed studio you take the studio with you, set up a desk against a wall of your own pattern, and work from a lay-by or a street with the city going past. The van, G833 MNT, became as much a piece as anything made inside it, though it has since gone.

Part of The Pattern Works.