The Palace Is a Refuge

The Posters

The posters came first, cut in lino and printed by hand. A Re Volt at the Palace, then The Palace Is a Refuge, then The Refuge, Come As You Are. Provocation, explanation, invitation, each edition numbered and carrying the opening date.

The first block had to be cut twice. The opening date supplied to Mark, 12 September, turned out to be wrong, so the lino was re-cut for the 14th and the street run started at edition 002. Poster 001, with the wrong date baked in, never left the studio.

The set went up on hoardings and doorways across the city alongside the gig posters, with no venue name and nothing to look up. The question was allowed to circulate.

Printing the Wallpaper

The wallpaper was designed and screen-printed by hand at one69A, Mark’s print studio at Islington Mill in Salford. One isometric diamond pattern, cut into layers and pulled in colourway after colourway: yellow on green, magenta on cream, orange on white, and a full multi-colour version with fine linework over the top.

Some of the sheets were destined for the bar. The rest were pasted onto boards in the studio, ready for a street campaign the city had not been told about.

Printed Straight Onto the Street

Between poster runs, Mark built a mobile screen printing kit into an old 7 inch record box: a screen, ink and a squeegee in a case made for singles. With it, the campaign’s statements went down in white ink directly onto bus shelters, windows and street furniture, so the city itself showed through the letters.

Every print changed with whatever stood behind the glass. A Re Volt at the Palace floating over Beetham Tower was the campaign’s best accidental composition.

Nine Installs in Nine Days

In the nine days before opening, nine wallpaper installs went up across the city: the boarded windows of the old Roadhouse on Newton Street, a sandstone block near the old fire station on London Road, Levenshulme, the viaducts at Castlefield, Norman Road, a framed shopfront in the Northern Quarter, Oxford Road, the fence line by Victoria Station, and a church wall in the city centre.

Each panel was pasted onto boards at the studio during the day, so the street work took minutes per site: a drill, screws, gone. The campaign asked one thing of the public, take your photo in front of the wallpaper, and people did, without knowing what any of it was for.

An Instagram post from the time credits the series the way it was meant to be read: work by Moderate Realism in Manchester, with support from The Refuge.

The Exhibition

The same patterns went onto fabric for an exhibition inside the bar. Printed square by square at the studio, sewn at home on a 1953 Singer picked up for £20 in a Halifax charity shop, stretched over long wedge-shaped frames, and hung high on the grey plaster of the long dining room in the days before opening.

The dog slept on the fabric while it was sewn. The chandeliers went up around the canvases. Everything printed, sewn, pasted and hung made it in time, more or less gracefully.

The Launch

The Refuge opened on 14 September 2016 and the launch party followed the week after. Mark’s patterns were projected across the arched windows, the mirror hexagons from the reception installation caught the party lights, and Mark Ronson played. The Manchester Evening News called the bash “pretty spectacular” and noted Mani was there.

Months of paste, ink and fabric, and the room finally full.

What Survived

The pattern outlived the campaign. It went onto the menus and the DJ booth, into the basement in a darker colourway, under the bar’s food photography, and behind Andrew Weatherall in a photograph from a Zutekh night. Some of the street boards were still clinging on four and a half years later, weathered into the brickwork.

Five years after opening, the mirrors were still up and the menus still carried the pattern.