I enjoy collaborating on events ranging from walks, publications, performances, exhibitions and film screenings to workshops and other creative projects. I have worked with organisations including Manchester Modernist Society, the North West Film Archive, the Loiterers Resistance Movement and Victoria Baths, and been part of projects at Castlefield Gallery, Paper Gallery, Manchester Literature Festival and Lancaster Arts.
As part of a project led by Lancaster School of Architecture, in collaboration with Lancaster Arts, I used archival sources to look at the university’s art collection and the changing place, purpose and form of artworks on the post-war university campus. Working with Lancaster Arts to deliver seminars on public art, I led tours of the campus sculptures to inform group projects about the campus by first-year architecture students.
Founded in 1964 as part of a post-war generation of ‘New Universities’, the university art collection was established in 1968 and overseen by an Embellishments Committee administered by a member of library staff with input from staff, students and the campus architects.
Now looked after by Lancaster Arts alongside a contemporary art programme, over time the collection has encompassed site-specific and commissioned works such as sculptures and murals together with paintings, prints and works on paper, ranging from the abstract and representational to the functional. Represented in the collection are artists local to Lancaster and the north west, as well as nationally and internationally significant artists, several of whom also carried out significant public commissions in the post-war period.
My research culminated in ‘Artworks and Embellishments’, a pop-up exhibition previewed at the symposium ‘Locus Lancaster: Campus, Place and Experience’ in March 2024, encompassing work ranging from a bust of the university’s first Vice-Chancellor Charles Carter by Frederick Glynne Potter and a set of ceremonial pewter tankards by the sculptor Geoffrey Clarke, dating from 1969, to more recent work commissioned by Lancaster Arts, including a set of proposals for the campus by Peter Liversidge and a ceramic bowl by Halima Cassell. The display also featured work by campus architects Tom Mellor and Peter Shepheard as well as artefacts relating to sculptures by 1970s resident artists John Hoskin and Anne Henecka. Also included were lithographs by Barbara Hepworth (whose sculpture ‘Abstract Form’ was the first to be unveiled on campus) and Elisabeth Frink, as well as prints by Jan Koliciak, David Vaughan, Max Yoshida and Ben Shahn. Paintings on show included work by Jeff Hoare, an artist and schoolteacher who created huge, lurid canvases as murals for the Environmental Sciences building during his time as Granada Foundation artist in residence in the 1970s , and a depiction of Lancaster’s historic Galgate Mill by Peter Brook.
How it started / How it’s going brought together new work on paper by Darren Nixon and Laura Hopkinson, shown in dialogue with my writing. The collaboration was part of an experimental writing programme run in conjunction with PAPER’s online critical writing publication, the Fourdrinier. For Nixon and Hopkinson as artists, and me as a writer, the challenges posed by the Covid-19 pandemic also presented an opportunity to experiment with new media and explore different ways of working.
The aim of How it started / How it’s going was not to present two artists’ work side-by-side; instead, it offered a snapshot of a conversation in progress. Rather than seeking to interpret or explain, How it started / How it’s going sketched out creative connections between the artists’ work, acting as starting points for further stories.
Manchester Left Writers (MLW) were selected to undertake an exhibition as part of Castlefield Gallery’s ‘Launch Pad’ series, chosen by Jerwood Charitable Foundation Director Shonagh Manson.
The Powerhouse Liberation Movement brought together film, installation, music, performance and a new publication based on searches across the city, dubbed the ‘economic powerhouse of the north of England’ by Manchester City Council, for ‘free’ spaces where notions of commonality, free expression and liberation are discoverable and can be accessed by all. We recorded our exploratory journeys across the city, from the Gay Village and ancient earthwork the Nico Ditch, to the satellite towns of Stockport and Rochdale. This resulted in a series of lo-fi ‘Notebook films’ documenting places, encounters and experiences. These were displayed alongside maps, notes, photographs and objects found and made during the process of making the films. We also commissioned a critical essay by Dr Gavin Macdonald, Lecturer in Art History at Manchester Metropolitan University.
During the public preview, and repeated for Manchester After Hours, MLW performed new poems to accompany the work on show. In addition, the quintet Vocal Harum (of which MLW writer Bob Dickinson is a member) performed a set of a cappella songs about buildings, by Talking Heads among others. We discussed and answered questions about our work and the exhibition at a public event chaired by Dr Gavin MacDonald.
Manchester University invited us to repeat our ‘Cacophony’ performance to close the ‘Art of Devolution: Culture and the North’ conference, which took place at Old Granada Studios, Manchester in June 2016. Films from the Powerhouse Liberation Movement exhibition were shown throughout the day.
Manchester Left Writers was formed in January 2014 to share and discuss reading and writing aligned to topical issues and challenges. We teamed up with the North West Film Archive (NWFA) at Manchester Metropolitan University for a unique, sell-out event for Manchester Literature Festival.
We paired up to read narrative, poetic, call-and-response pieces of writing based on our experiences and encounters in the city and the sensations of contemporary life. Each of the Precarious Passages readings was accompanied by historic films we selected from the NWFA. From vintage footage of Hulme to streetscapes of Manchester and Stockport, CND protests and street carnivals to slum clearance and rebuilding, we brought past and present imagery into dialogue to give a new perspective on regularly encountered environments and situations.
We created a new piece of writing and performance especially for the event, responding to an extraordinary 1961 film of Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin visiting Trafford Park. Gagarin, who was himself a foundry worker, visited foundry workers in Trafford Park just three months after his space flight in Vostok. Manchester’s welcoming of Gagarin took place against the backdrop of the Cuba crisis and further East-West tension in Berlin.
Precarious Passages conjure new and distinctive responses to everyday places, landmarks, thoughts and feelings, from trains and transport hubs, to the redevelopment of inner-city areas, to the notorious 192 bus route, in ways that are at once familiar and abstract, fragmented and poetic. The Precarious Passages are laid out in two facing columns, which can be read across, or down and over, in a number of ways.
We repeated the readings at Verbose, a monthly live literature event at Fallow Cafe in Fallowfield, Manchester, in March 2016, with Manchester Left Writers as special guests, and debuted a new instalment of Precarious Passages.
I took on board feedback from visitors to previous events for the third self-publishing festival at Victoria Baths, which expanded to offer a broader take on DIY culture. Events included two screenings of Helpyourself Manchester, a documentary by the Manchester-based filmmaking and anthropology collective Castles Built in Sand, followed by question and answer sessions. There was also an exhibition of original gig fliers featured in the film in the gala pool.
I invited musician, illustrator and fanzine-maker David Carden to take visitors on a ‘musical tour’ of Victoria Baths, inspired by memories donated to the Victoria Baths archive. He explored aspects of the building’s history through song, from famous Channel swimmer Sunny Lowry and dirty, recycled swimming pool water to couples meeting at the Baths.
Artists’ collective Pool Arts helped visitors make a collaborative edition of the Baths’ own fanzine The Vicky, based on the idea of a campaign to bring back public baths.
Karren Ablaze! read from her recent book The City is Ablaze, about making fanzines in Manchester and Leeds in the 1980s and 1990s. Author David Hartley read from his latest book. John Mather talked about his self-published Pictorial Guide to Greater Manchester’s Public Swimming Pools and the region’s history of producing swimming champions.
I organised the second Victoria Baths Fanzine Convention around the theme ‘mass participation and collaboration’.
Held during Future Everything festival, the event featured a range of stalls, as well as tours and talks on ‘zine libraries, post-punk culture and riot grrrl and feminist fanzines. Other activities included a screening of Salford Zine Library’s film Self-Publishers of the World Take-Over and an exhibition of posters of inspirational European women taken from the fanzine Shape & Situate.
I produced a special souvenir programme, which acted as a guide to the day. Coinciding with the International Year of Co-operatives, I asked Footprint Workers’ Co-op to give demonstrations of their risograph and invited visitors to contribute to a giant, collaborative fanzine, which was made throughout the event by participants in linocutting, relief printing, button book binding and collaging workshops using material from the Victoria Baths archive.
Sheffield-based artist duo Shift Space piloted the use of an augmented reality app which allowed people to explore the local area and point their smartphones at the building to receive visual and audio content; for example, visitors could view how the baths looked in the past, in the exact spot where they were standing, by holding their phone at eye level.
I was invited to curate the Victoria Baths Fanzine Convention, bringing self-publishers and visitors from across the country to one of Manchester’s best-loved and most historic buildings for a day of browsing and selling, networking, workshops, talks, tours and a film-screening.
The Convention took place during the annual Future Everything festival of digital culture. I produced a souvenir programme, which acted as a guide to the Convention as well as festival events taking place elsewhere in the building. I drew on the rich heritage of the building and the place of swimming baths in architectural and social history.
I collaborated with Manchester Modernist Society and the Loiterers Resistance Movement on Manchester’s Modernist Heroines, a project marking 100 years of International Women’s Day.
We celebrated ten overlooked North West women from the twentieth and twenty first centuries, who were pioneers in fields from architecture and aviation to psychology and family planning.
The project culminated in a walk led by Morag Rose. I edited a publication comprising responses to the Heroines by contemporary Manchester women. The walk was repeated throughout 2011 due to popular demand, and in June 2012 during the Love Architecture festival. In August 2016 it was repeated as part of a series of events accompanying the Loiterers Resistance Movement 10th anniversary exhibition Loitering With Intent at the People’s History Museum in Manchester.
To accompany a media special of The Shrieking Violet, I teamed up with Manchester Modernist Society for a film screening celebrating Manchester’s media heritage.
We showed three short documentaries from the North West Film Archive:
Salford newsagent, amateur filmmaker and onetime newspaper delivery boy Ralph Brookes documented the changing face of the inner city area Ordsall in the 1960s and ‘70s, making over ninety home movies about the community around him, documenting everything from his home, family, birthdays and Christmas to mingling with the stars for an episode of Coronation Street which was filmed in the local park.
Colourful, jaunty, jazz-soundtracked film about how the Evening News is produced. Made in 1968 to celebrate the newspaper’s centenary, the film shows the ‘daily miracle’ that is producing a newspaper, from visiting the various departments in the newspaper offices to distributing copies around the city to be read in suburban family homes.
A day in the life of the famous Guardian newspaper in 1960 (four years before it moved to London), from meeting the journalists in the various departments which put it together to printing with Linotype and hot lead and its distribution around the country.
The organisers of Salford’s annual Sounds from the Other City festival of music and art commissioned me to make a programme for the event.
Working within a tight timeframe, I collaborated with illustrator Dominic Oliver to create a fanzine-style publication that contained key information such as stage times, line-ups and locations, as well as acting as a guide to the area.
I enjoy collaborating on events ranging from walks, publications, performances, exhibitions and film screenings to workshops and other creative projects. I have worked with organisations including Manchester Modernist Society, the North West Film Archive, the Loiterers Resistance Movement and Victoria Baths, and been part of projects at Castlefield Gallery, Paper Gallery, Manchester Literature Festival and Lancaster Arts.
As part of a project led by Lancaster School of Architecture, in collaboration with Lancaster Arts, I used archival sources to look at the university’s art collection and the changing place, purpose and form of artworks on the post-war university campus. Working with Lancaster Arts to deliver seminars on public art, I led tours of the campus sculptures to inform group projects about the campus by first-year architecture students.
Founded in 1964 as part of a post-war generation of ‘New Universities’, the university art collection was established in 1968 and overseen by an Embellishments Committee administered by a member of library staff with input from staff, students and the campus architects.
Now looked after by Lancaster Arts alongside a contemporary art programme, over time the collection has encompassed site-specific and commissioned works such as sculptures and murals together with paintings, prints and works on paper, ranging from the abstract and representational to the functional. Represented in the collection are artists local to Lancaster and the north west, as well as nationally and internationally significant artists, several of whom also carried out significant public commissions in the post-war period.
My research culminated in ‘Artworks and Embellishments’, a pop-up exhibition previewed at the symposium ‘Locus Lancaster: Campus, Place and Experience’ in March 2024, encompassing work ranging from a bust of the university’s first Vice-Chancellor Charles Carter by Frederick Glynne Potter and a set of ceremonial pewter tankards by the sculptor Geoffrey Clarke, dating from 1969, to more recent work commissioned by Lancaster Arts, including a set of proposals for the campus by Peter Liversidge and a ceramic bowl by Halima Cassell. The display also featured work by campus architects Tom Mellor and Peter Shepheard as well as artefacts relating to sculptures by 1970s resident artists John Hoskin and Anne Henecka. Also included were lithographs by Barbara Hepworth (whose sculpture ‘Abstract Form’ was the first to be unveiled on campus) and Elisabeth Frink, as well as prints by Jan Koliciak, David Vaughan, Max Yoshida and Ben Shahn. Paintings on show included work by Jeff Hoare, an artist and schoolteacher who created huge, lurid canvases as murals for the Environmental Sciences building during his time as Granada Foundation artist in residence in the 1970s , and a depiction of Lancaster’s historic Galgate Mill by Peter Brook.
How it started / How it’s going brought together new work on paper by Darren Nixon and Laura Hopkinson, shown in dialogue with my writing. The collaboration was part of an experimental writing programme run in conjunction with PAPER’s online critical writing publication, the Fourdrinier. For Nixon and Hopkinson as artists, and me as a writer, the challenges posed by the Covid-19 pandemic also presented an opportunity to experiment with new media and explore different ways of working.
The aim of How it started / How it’s going was not to present two artists’ work side-by-side; instead, it offered a snapshot of a conversation in progress. Rather than seeking to interpret or explain, How it started / How it’s going sketched out creative connections between the artists’ work, acting as starting points for further stories.
Manchester Left Writers (MLW) were selected to undertake an exhibition as part of Castlefield Gallery’s ‘Launch Pad’ series, chosen by Jerwood Charitable Foundation Director Shonagh Manson.
The Powerhouse Liberation Movement brought together film, installation, music, performance and a new publication based on searches across the city, dubbed the ‘economic powerhouse of the north of England’ by Manchester City Council, for ‘free’ spaces where notions of commonality, free expression and liberation are discoverable and can be accessed by all. We recorded our exploratory journeys across the city, from the Gay Village and ancient earthwork the Nico Ditch, to the satellite towns of Stockport and Rochdale. This resulted in a series of lo-fi ‘Notebook films’ documenting places, encounters and experiences. These were displayed alongside maps, notes, photographs and objects found and made during the process of making the films. We also commissioned a critical essay by Dr Gavin Macdonald, Lecturer in Art History at Manchester Metropolitan University.
During the public preview, and repeated for Manchester After Hours, MLW performed new poems to accompany the work on show. In addition, the quintet Vocal Harum (of which MLW writer Bob Dickinson is a member) performed a set of a cappella songs about buildings, by Talking Heads among others. We discussed and answered questions about our work and the exhibition at a public event chaired by Dr Gavin MacDonald.
Manchester University invited us to repeat our ‘Cacophony’ performance to close the ‘Art of Devolution: Culture and the North’ conference, which took place at Old Granada Studios, Manchester in June 2016. Films from the Powerhouse Liberation Movement exhibition were shown throughout the day.
Manchester Left Writers was formed in January 2014 to share and discuss reading and writing aligned to topical issues and challenges. We teamed up with the North West Film Archive (NWFA) at Manchester Metropolitan University for a unique, sell-out event for Manchester Literature Festival.
We paired up to read narrative, poetic, call-and-response pieces of writing based on our experiences and encounters in the city and the sensations of contemporary life. Each of the Precarious Passages readings was accompanied by historic films we selected from the NWFA. From vintage footage of Hulme to streetscapes of Manchester and Stockport, CND protests and street carnivals to slum clearance and rebuilding, we brought past and present imagery into dialogue to give a new perspective on regularly encountered environments and situations.
We created a new piece of writing and performance especially for the event, responding to an extraordinary 1961 film of Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin visiting Trafford Park. Gagarin, who was himself a foundry worker, visited foundry workers in Trafford Park just three months after his space flight in Vostok. Manchester’s welcoming of Gagarin took place against the backdrop of the Cuba crisis and further East-West tension in Berlin.
Precarious Passages conjure new and distinctive responses to everyday places, landmarks, thoughts and feelings, from trains and transport hubs, to the redevelopment of inner-city areas, to the notorious 192 bus route, in ways that are at once familiar and abstract, fragmented and poetic. The Precarious Passages are laid out in two facing columns, which can be read across, or down and over, in a number of ways.
We repeated the readings at Verbose, a monthly live literature event at Fallow Cafe in Fallowfield, Manchester, in March 2016, with Manchester Left Writers as special guests, and debuted a new instalment of Precarious Passages.
I took on board feedback from visitors to previous events for the third self-publishing festival at Victoria Baths, which expanded to offer a broader take on DIY culture. Events included two screenings of Helpyourself Manchester, a documentary by the Manchester-based filmmaking and anthropology collective Castles Built in Sand, followed by question and answer sessions. There was also an exhibition of original gig fliers featured in the film in the gala pool.
I invited musician, illustrator and fanzine-maker David Carden to take visitors on a ‘musical tour’ of Victoria Baths, inspired by memories donated to the Victoria Baths archive. He explored aspects of the building’s history through song, from famous Channel swimmer Sunny Lowry and dirty, recycled swimming pool water to couples meeting at the Baths.
Artists’ collective Pool Arts helped visitors make a collaborative edition of the Baths’ own fanzine The Vicky, based on the idea of a campaign to bring back public baths.
Karren Ablaze! read from her recent book The City is Ablaze, about making fanzines in Manchester and Leeds in the 1980s and 1990s. Author David Hartley read from his latest book. John Mather talked about his self-published Pictorial Guide to Greater Manchester’s Public Swimming Pools and the region’s history of producing swimming champions.
I organised the second Victoria Baths Fanzine Convention around the theme ‘mass participation and collaboration’.
Held during Future Everything festival, the event featured a range of stalls, as well as tours and talks on ‘zine libraries, post-punk culture and riot grrrl and feminist fanzines. Other activities included a screening of Salford Zine Library’s film Self-Publishers of the World Take-Over and an exhibition of posters of inspirational European women taken from the fanzine Shape & Situate.
I produced a special souvenir programme, which acted as a guide to the day. Coinciding with the International Year of Co-operatives, I asked Footprint Workers’ Co-op to give demonstrations of their risograph and invited visitors to contribute to a giant, collaborative fanzine, which was made throughout the event by participants in linocutting, relief printing, button book binding and collaging workshops using material from the Victoria Baths archive.
Sheffield-based artist duo Shift Space piloted the use of an augmented reality app which allowed people to explore the local area and point their smartphones at the building to receive visual and audio content; for example, visitors could view how the baths looked in the past, in the exact spot where they were standing, by holding their phone at eye level.
I was invited to curate the Victoria Baths Fanzine Convention, bringing self-publishers and visitors from across the country to one of Manchester’s best-loved and most historic buildings for a day of browsing and selling, networking, workshops, talks, tours and a film-screening.
The Convention took place during the annual Future Everything festival of digital culture. I produced a souvenir programme, which acted as a guide to the Convention as well as festival events taking place elsewhere in the building. I drew on the rich heritage of the building and the place of swimming baths in architectural and social history.
I collaborated with Manchester Modernist Society and the Loiterers Resistance Movement on Manchester’s Modernist Heroines, a project marking 100 years of International Women’s Day.
We celebrated ten overlooked North West women from the twentieth and twenty first centuries, who were pioneers in fields from architecture and aviation to psychology and family planning.
The project culminated in a walk led by Morag Rose. I edited a publication comprising responses to the Heroines by contemporary Manchester women. The walk was repeated throughout 2011 due to popular demand, and in June 2012 during the Love Architecture festival. In August 2016 it was repeated as part of a series of events accompanying the Loiterers Resistance Movement 10th anniversary exhibition Loitering With Intent at the People’s History Museum in Manchester.
To accompany a media special of The Shrieking Violet, I teamed up with Manchester Modernist Society for a film screening celebrating Manchester’s media heritage.
We showed three short documentaries from the North West Film Archive:
Salford newsagent, amateur filmmaker and onetime newspaper delivery boy Ralph Brookes documented the changing face of the inner city area Ordsall in the 1960s and ‘70s, making over ninety home movies about the community around him, documenting everything from his home, family, birthdays and Christmas to mingling with the stars for an episode of Coronation Street which was filmed in the local park.
Colourful, jaunty, jazz-soundtracked film about how the Evening News is produced. Made in 1968 to celebrate the newspaper’s centenary, the film shows the ‘daily miracle’ that is producing a newspaper, from visiting the various departments in the newspaper offices to distributing copies around the city to be read in suburban family homes.
A day in the life of the famous Guardian newspaper in 1960 (four years before it moved to London), from meeting the journalists in the various departments which put it together to printing with Linotype and hot lead and its distribution around the country.
The organisers of Salford’s annual Sounds from the Other City festival of music and art commissioned me to make a programme for the event.
Working within a tight timeframe, I collaborated with illustrator Dominic Oliver to create a fanzine-style publication that contained key information such as stage times, line-ups and locations, as well as acting as a guide to the area.
