Category: Journal

A logo I made for the fun of it, Moderation Manchester: the acid-house smiley face set over a spiralling vortex of perspective lines, in black on acid yellow, with Moderation Manchester lettered around it in a hand-drawn wobble. It takes the most loaded graphic in Manchester dance history, the yellow smiley, and bends the grid behind it into a tunnel you fall into.

The name is a straight play on Moderate, tipped over into Moderation, and the mark leans all the way into the rave heritage it is quoting. Acid yellow, a smiley, a vanishing-point spiral: it could only be Manchester. No grand plan behind it, just a bit of fun with my own name and the city’s night life.

The keys, officially. Peter Green from Railway Paths Limited, the landlords, handed the station over, and Abigail Pound, one of the founders, was there for it. We stood in the stripped-out hall where the shop fittings used to be.

Years of meetings, drawings and fundraising, and then a set of keys and an empty Victorian station that was suddenly, actually, ours to make something of.

Part of the Station South case study.

The finished Haunt piece up on its wall, in the nook beside the stairs, with a light set over it. The mirrored acrylic cluster sits on the patterned panel and picks up whatever the room is doing, so it reads differently through the day rather than staying the same.

This was the point of building it the way I did. Not an image to look at once, but a surface that moves with the light and the people in front of it, holding a specific wall in a specific bar on Peter Street rather than being a thing that could hang anywhere.

Part of the Haunt Bar Commission case study.

Plant pots made during lockdown out of things from around the house. An old food-mixer bowl bolted onto a stone as a base, a chipped enamel jug, a mug given a drippy glaze, each one planted up with succulents and trailing greenery and stood on a bit of salvaged wood. Making planters out of the kitchen because the kitchen was where you were.

This is what happens when the studio is shut and the making does not stop. You look around the house for anything that will hold soil and a plant, and turn it into an object with a bit of care. Not really art, not really not, just the same instinct to make something out of what is to hand, pointed at the windowsill for a while.

Making the Haunt piece in June 2021. A cluster of laser-cut mirrored acrylic forms, cut and arranged on a patterned fabric panel, worked out flat on the floor and the workbench before it went anywhere near a wall.

Haunt is a coffee, wine and aperitivo bar on Peter Street in central Manchester, and they came to me directly, ahead of opening, for a piece to anchor one wall. The idea was something that would shift and catch under the room’s lighting rather than sit flat as a picture, so most of the work was in the cutting and the angles.

Part of the Haunt Bar Commission case study.

We recreated the 2010 rooftop portrait, Sally Gilford and me back in the arched window at the top of Islington Mill, almost ten years on, as we decided to close one69A.

Same window, same two people, a lot of printing in between. Twelve years, from a basement in West Didsbury to a print and distribution business, and then a decision to stop.

It printed nearly everything else on this site. A good place to have started.

Part of the one69A case study.

Five years later, one of the prints came back out and went into a custom frame, hung on a blue wall at home above a run of colour.

The club night and the costume competition are long gone. Saint with Flowers, framed and living in the house now. The image held up, which is the test really, whether a thing made fast for one night still works quietly on a wall years later. This one does, and it is the one I chose to keep where I would see it.

Part of the Vivienne Westwood case study.

A piece of my Moderate Realism work, made for the back of the Artvert board at Station South. Rainbow hexagons over a black and white op-art ground, designed on screen.

The front of the board carries advertising. The back is somewhere to put an image straight into the street, for nothing, for anyone passing.

Part of Moderate Realism. Also relates to Artvert, Station South.

Artvert, finished and out in the world. One face reads ARTVERT, THE SOCIAL ADVERTISING BOARD, with a line pointing anyone interested to Station South. The other carries the artwork, the interlocking triangles, facing back down the road.

I designed the name, the branding and the front, and made the first piece for the back. Photographed from across the junctions and down the terraced streets of Levenshulme, it reads as a proper billboard, which is what it needed to be to earn its keep and pay for what goes on the other side.

Part of the Artvert case study.