Printing a Station South fabric at one69A, the studio at Islington Mill. The pattern pulled by hand across a long textile table, metre after metre, blue and pink and yellow stacked up in registration.
One of the patterns for the project, made the slow way. A table, a squeegee, and a lot of repetition.
Part of the Station South case study.
My grandma stood in front of my mirror in the private dining room at the Refuge today. Blue dress, hands together, the honeycomb panel glowing gold above the fireplace behind her, portraits on the wall beside it.
I took one photograph.
Of everything that has come out of the Palace Hotel work, this picture is the one I will keep.
Part of The Palace Hotel Commission.
A year on, still making them. New designs propped up at home, a tighter ripple and a scale pattern like fish or roof tiles, worked out on the same laser-and-acid process.
The mirrors turned into the thing I kept coming back to between other jobs. Easy to start, hard to stop, every new pattern just another way of drawing with the light instead of on it.
This pair caught the sofa and the plants and me holding the camera, which is the deal with a mirror, you are always somewhere in the picture.
Part of the Mirrors (Open House) case study.
A joint exhibition with Sally Gilford, shown up in a raw timber-beamed loft. A big banner of mine, an old-master portrait printed onto hanging cloth, stands behind a mannequin wearing a green floral dress and a heavy statement necklace. Print and cloth and garment together in a rough wooden space, half gallery, half attic.
Two people’s work in one room always throws up things neither would get to alone. Her making and mine set next to each other, the printed banner and the dressed figure reading as one piece even though they started apart. The setting does a lot of the work too, that old beamed roof turning the whole thing into something staged and still.
The Station South pattern went up on a bricked-up window in Levenshulme, the pink, blue and yellow chevron hand-printed and pasted like the Refuge work before it. Same method, new project.
A neighbour spotted it and posted it online, which is usually how you know a thing has landed. Work made for a station that was still years from opening, already out on the streets nearby, getting people used to the idea.
Part of the Station South case study. Also relates to Moderate Realism.
Martha on the street at first light, the sky gone completely orange over the terraces, parked where she always parked. This is 2018, near the end of her time with me, and she was retired not long after, eight years in.
Nothing dramatic in this one, just a hearse and a good sky on an ordinary Manchester morning. You stop noticing the strangeness of the thing on your own street, until a morning like this one reminds you it was there all along.
Part of the Remembering Martha case study.
Two years on and the Refuge pattern keeps being put to work. The menus now carry the cube motif in red and green; the mobile DJ booth in the dining room is wrapped in a pale colourway with speakers either side.
A pattern designed for one campaign has become the venue's handwriting. That is the quiet definition of a job that worked.
Part of The Palace Is a Refuge.
After the protest there was a lot of printed cloth left over, so it became bags. Reversible shoulder bags, the busy pink and the black-and-white collage on one face and a plain dark lining on the other, run up from the offcuts of the Drag Against Trump costumes.
A tidy end for a one-day thing. The fabric that had been a costume for an afternoon in London carried on as something you could actually use, the protest folded up and slung over a shoulder, still readable to anyone who knew where the pattern had been.
Part of the Drag Against Trump case study.
Drag Against Trump out on the streets of London, July 2018, around the visit that brought the Trump baby blimp up over Parliament. Piccadilly Circus full of drag queens in the printed fabric, NO CLOSETS NO CAGES held up over the crowd, the cloth I had printed doing exactly what it was for, out in the light and moving.
It reached further than the march. BBC Newsnight ran it and The Guardian covered it, so the pattern turned up on television and in the papers as well as on the road. A protest that understood it had to be watchable, and drag, which has always known the same thing.
Part of the Drag Against Trump case study.
Printing the fabric for Drag Against Trump, early July 2018. A repeating collage pattern, with Black Lives Matter placards, a distorted Union Jack and Trump himself all folded into it, run off in three colourways: hot pink, blue, and black and white. It was a commission from Cheddar Gorgeous, to be made up into costumes for the protest.
Metres of it coming off the table, the same busy image over and over until it reads almost as camouflage. Printed cloth as a way of turning up loud, the drag and the politics carried in what everyone was wearing rather than only on the placards.
Part of the Drag Against Trump case study.