Issue 44 April 2012
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3 0 M a rc h - 2 9 A p r i l 2 0 1 2 B LA N KS PAC E , M a n c h e s te r b l a n k m e d i a c o l l e c t i ve . o rg / i n s i d e
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contents get in touch welcome... spotlight - Thomas Key blankverse - Geoffrey Heptonstall fiction - Jack Wittels this month’s mp3 - Last Harbour feature - Typed Art blankpicks - Louis Barabbas cover artist - Michael Barrow Blank Media recommends credits
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you are listening to Last Harbour - Never
cover art By Michael Barrow
Every month we showcase writers, artists and musicians who deserve to share their work with the wider arts community and the public as a whole. You can send your work for consideration by emailing editor@blankmediacollective.org Click here for full submission guidelines: blankmediacollective.org/blankpages/guidelines/
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welcome I’m writing this on a beautiful sunny day. I have a feeling it won’t last, or that this will be the extent of summer. Until October that is. It’s April and since our last digital issue in February the blankpages team have produced not one but TWO publications “in the flesh”. The first was our collaboration with Dave Haslam and Manchester Histories Festival, a special limited edition of 100 which we launched with success at the festival. You’ll be able to get a copy for yourself in some select venues and online soon so keep your eyes open for that. The second is our equally special (but for different reasons) handmade booklet to accompany Blank Media Collective’s first exhibition of 2012 – Inside. The show is currently up at BLANKSPACE and you can get your hands on our beautiful hand screen printed publications there throughout April. I’d also like to take this opportunity to welcome Anne Louise Kershaw, our new blankpages Music Editor, who treats us to her first feature this month – an album review for Last Harbour. We’re thrilled to have such an engaged and enthusiastic new team member, so welcome Anne.
John Leyland Editor
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spotlight
Thomas Key
Untitled (staple box) Staples
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Detail. Geometric. Fantasy. Those are the three words I think best describe my style of illustration. I’m passionate about hand-drawn illustrations. A pen to paper // throwing the creative juices at a blank page // the magical outcome. Illustration allows me to enter into a world in which there are no inhibitions: a platform of surrealism. With a mixed injection of emotion, opinion, mood, cheese dreams, state of mind - different vibes are attached to my work every time. From humour to anger, fear to fantasy, happiness to darkness, the outcome is synthesized. When at my desk, I enjoy being surrounded by mess – paper scraps, shapes and cut-outs, magazines, sketchbooks, miscellaneous objects, all piled together and spilling across my work space. This is my ideal working world. I can scribble out ideas, visualise, get lost and get inspired.
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Thomas Key is a 23-year-old British illustrator based in London. Thomas’ work is deeply rooted in his own unique brand of surrealism. Always colourful and mostly humorous, his intricate hand-drawn pieces are a constant reflection of his internal moods and thoughts, as well as some external influences such as music, nature and daily life.
For further information about Thomas Key and his work, follow the link below: www.thomaskeyillustration.com
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blankverse
Geoffrey Heptonstall Tending the Vines When shadows crossed the sunlit lawns, Remembering: How we thought they were lost. Gazing again: On the photographs Of a family convened. We supposed time had chosen How a garden gate might close With the silence of the scene. A childhood in monochrome Of box camera contrasts Before the world was invented. Such frail memorials To lives everlasting We keep as curators Of imagined cadavers. What I can remember Are things I never knew.
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Nomad’s Land Crossing the ravine a span of iron (Intrusive, determined,Victorian) Allowing an easy passage And an over-view of the world moving. My brother and I were watching hail fall Onto the roofs of scurrying cars. Primeval ice had cut this course, A fissure to the sea where we summered. The town in eighteenth century elegance Was almost as interesting as the jellyfish We found, like a shipwrecked survivor Among a savage tribe: An unknown life revealed on the strand When the sea turned back beneath our feet. Sea charts show the nature of the waters, Invisible to the eye. Steering a channel clear of the shallows, Foreign cargoes come to harbour. We wake in the morning to see pale horizon. Close by the masts rise with the light. The ships sway at anchor, Motioning to sail with the tide.
A Contributing Writer at Contemporary Review, recently Geoffrey has had published stories in Cerise Press, Litro and Sunk Island Review. He has had numerous poems published in many respectable publications. Essays and reviews appeared in The Bow Wow Shop, Cerise Press, The London Magazine, Prole, The Tablet and The TLS.
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fiction
Jack Wittels Two Months After I Kil ed My Brother Two months after killing Danny I was still in Palermo, living in a youth hostel called A Casa di Amici. I didn’t have to pay for my room, as long as I served the breakfast every morning and helped the cleaners on Thursday afternoons. I spent the rest of my time at the South end of Mondello beach by the cliffs, sunbathing in my chequered red and blue swim shorts and listening to the surf breaking over the bleached white sand. Sometimes I played a game where I clenched my teeth and sucked the spit back and forth between them, trying to keep in time with the waves. One morning two young backpackers - a boy and a girl - approached me and asked directions to the nearest hostel. They had middle class London accents and shifted their packs on their shoulders as they spoke. I considered pretending not to understand English, but the girl’s prominent collar bone caught my eye and I felt a pinch of attraction. She was part oriental and unhealthily slender - hips so narrow I could almost have closed my hands around them. I offered to walk the pair to my hostel. They agreed and I slipped into the tour guide role, telling them about
Chatoulle’s and La Posada, local cafes which served excellent sea food. Danny would have eaten at them every day, yelling at the waitresses and laughing when they didn’t understand. The backpacker girl was called Kharissa and the boy John or James, I can’t remember. When we got to Amici’s I invited them to come and meet me once they’d unpacked.They both thanked me and shook my hand – the boy first. I nodded at Arianna the receptionist, and went back to my spot on the beach. Half an hour later I saw them walking by the surf. Kharissa was wearing a turquoise bikini that clung hopelessly to her flat chest. I stopped playing my spit game and beckoned them over. They both had white towels from the hostel, and came as soon as they saw me waving. Kharissa spread hers out next to mine and the boy did the same on the far side so that we formed a line facing the sea, the boy closest to the cliffs and Kharissa in between us. I watched as she leant over to smooth her towel out on the bumpy sand next to me. She had completely hairless armpits that reminded me of a child’s. We started to chat, all lying on our backs looking up at
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the cloudless sky. I hadn’t spoken English to anyone else since arriving in Italy and enjoyed the conversation more than I’d thought I would. They were both travelling around Europe for the summer between the end of college and University. Kharissa was going on to study medicine at Kings, and the boy geography, somewhere up north. Danny had been the same age as them, but he’d been heading for the law courts. Asking how they knew each other, I found out that they’d only met three days ago in a Napoli hostel, where they’d agreed to travel round Sicily together. In response to their questions, I told them I was here on business and had the next couple of days off. They didn’t ask me anything else. After the conversation died, the boy announced that he was going for a swim and asked Kharissa if she wanted to come, but she was enjoying the sun too much so he went off alone. We were about thirty metres away from where the waves were breaking, and I sat up to watch the boy as he walked down to the water. His shoulder blades were already pink, and any sun cream he was wearing would soon wash off in the sea. I turned my eyes back to Kharissa. She was lying on her front, head resting in folded arms, forefinger and thumb reaching back every couple of minutes to fiddle with her bikini bottom; a thin blue line that sliced between the backs of her thighs and tight cheeks. I held my hand out at an angle above her calf so that it cast a shadow over her legs and slowly moved it upwards – along the backs of her knees, up onto her hamstrings – like black ivy twisting up a tree trunk. I kept my hand’s shadow hovering at her bikini line, and just my eyes slid further up, over the dimples of
her spine, all the way to her neck, then back down to her waist and around her flanks, fixing on the dark lines of the tiger tattoo that arched up her left side, its claws extending round her ribcage and curling towards her throat. Danny’s throat had been much thicker. She reached down to fiddle with her bikini again and I leant forwards and tapped her on the front of her shoulder, as near to her collarbone as I could get. She rolled over onto her side and looked at me. ‘Do you want to play a game?’ I asked. ‘That depends what the game is.’ ‘It’s the game where you have three seconds to answer a question,’ I smiled. She raised her eyebrows. ‘Why three seconds?’ ‘To be sure it’s the first thing that comes into your head.’ She propped herself up on an elbow. Black hair covered half her face so that only one eye was lit by the midday sun. ‘Do you think that’s always the truth?’ ‘That’s just the game. Do you want to play?’ ‘Sure.’ We both moved into a cross legged sitting position, Kharissa with her back to the cliffs and the sea to her right. ‘What’s your favourite colour?’ I asked. ‘Red. Are all the questions going to be like this?’ ‘That’s up to you. Now ask me one.’ She looked down at the sand between us, then back up into my eyes.
Illustration by Michael Thorp
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‘What possessed you to buy those swimming shorts?’ ‘They were my brother’s.’ ‘Ha. Well may I suggest you return them to him and buy your own?’ ‘You may.’ ‘Thank you.’ ‘No problem. My go again. What did you dream about last night?’ She paused and looked away to her right.The truth side. ‘I can’t remember.’ ‘Try.’ ‘I really can’t. I never remember my dreams.’ ‘You should learn. Your dreams are when you’re most alive.’ ‘Is that so? What did you dream about last night then?’ ‘Me? It’s hard to put into words you’ll understand. How about you come down to the water and I’ll try to show you?’ She rolled her eyes. ‘Really? I’m kind of enjoying the sun.’ ‘Really.’ ‘Fine. Let’s go.’ We got up and followed the footprints the boy had left in the sand down to the water and stood ankle deep in the surf. I could see the tips of his shoulders and the back of his head bobbing up and down between the waves about forty metres out. He’d be really burnt by now. ‘So, what did you dream about?’ asked Kharissa. I felt the sand rubbing between my toes as it was pulled out to sea, grain by grain, and thought about one of the rougher handles of the knives I’d hefted before choosing
the one for Danny.The guy had said it hardly mattered how sharp or what shape it was. The only thing, he’d said, was how good it felt in your hand, so that the moment before you slammed it between someone else’s ribs, everything felt good and right and you wouldn’t lose your nerve. ‘I dreamt of a perfect moment.’ ‘And what was that?’ I slipped my right arm around Kharissa’s neck and ran my finger along her collar bone. When she leant in, I put my left hand under her chin and pulled her lips towards me for a long, wet kiss. One of her hands gripped the back of my head and a finger pressed behind my ear, then she pulled away. ‘That’s not an answer.’ ‘You’re right.’ I leant in again and this time Kharissa’s fingers pressed harder against the back of my head. I grabbed her by the hips and pulled her down into the surf. Danny would have liked that. For a moment, I forgot about the rough little grains of sand being slowly dragged between my toes. A few facts about Jack Wittels: he is on the Creative Writing MA in Manchester where he writes fiction and poetry, both of which he has had published in a few magazines. His work is intended to be startling and thought provoking, though he doesn’t take himself anywhere near as seriously as this makes him sound. If you read one of his stories and bump into him on the street, he will buy you a drink. Maybe two. He is also on the lookout for fiction editing work/internships and already has a fair bit of (some paid) experience.
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this month’s mp3
Last Harbour
‘Your heart, it carries the sound’
For a group whose music seems to sit entirely outside of time, it is interesting to know that when recording their new album ‘Your heart, it carries the sound’, Last Harbour “wanted the album to come from somewhere, to be linked with a time and a place.” The Manchester-based expansive collective create songs “from dusty laments to doom-filled rock, from starkly beautiful duets to drifting clouds of looped noise, the only claims they make for their music are that it is honest and heartfelt.” This is what it says on their website, which is a good place to begin exploring their aesthetic. You only need to be a few pages in to realise, that while music is the aural element of the art produced by Last Harbour, they actually create so much more than just a set of songs. As lead singer Kevin Craig explains: “that was one of our aims, right from the writing process -– that the album would be a complete work, rather than a collection of songs - and that the place of writing and recording would have an effect on everything.”
by Anne Louise Kershaw
On their homepage you are greeted with the beautiful, technical heart illustration that is printed on the cover of the album. This graphic but delicate symbol, complete with valves, ventricles and veins, sits emitting sound waves like a 1940’s radio tower. The site is mainly monochrome, as is the video for ‘Never’, from the album, that also welcomes you. This transmits an effectively filmic quality. It places the band in a context – not of record shop shelves, promotions and tickets – but of
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darkened movie theatres, long, lonely train journeys and late night woodland walks. Musical inspiration ranges from Medieval to Neu! (‘More Bowie!’ was a regular instruction from co-producer, Sam Lench, during the making of the album), yet you feel that film might play a larger inspirational role for Last Harbour. Craig very much appreciates “the way cinema creates a mood that you can be immersed in”. Last Harbour have created an album that mirrors this quality, Craig explains: “film has always been a pretty big thing for us. People like Bela Tarr or Tarkovsky. They're often touch-stones that we come back to.” Consequently, the album feels like a soundtrack to your life – at the times you take it most seriously. “Lyrically, I always think of the songs as films, they play out in that way for me.”
“It was written in a small cottage in Northumbria. It was pretty isolated, just a road, a reservoir and woods. We'd worked that way with the previous album 'Volo', and there's something about removing yourself from your everyday surroundings and bringing a sense of location to the writing process.” Unsurprisingly this is what the album itself does to the listener. Craig continues: “We moved the furniture out and set up our equipment and played, fairly intensely the whole time we were there. The idea of a sense of place was then carried through to the recording. We knew that we wanted to record with a fairly live sound, to preserve the feel of the cottage, and to have the location of the recording affect the songs. So along with Sam Lench, we set up in St Margaret's Church and used the building's natural reverb and resonance within the songs.”
“My personal highlight of recording was beating a 7-foot length of metal ducting with my fists for three minutes”
The album evokes the indulgent boredom and longing of teenage cigarettes out of windows far away from home. It makes you feel like you are an adult, with a very old secret to think about during a long unsleeping night.
Their focus certainly encourages the listeners. The reason for such encouraging introversion is because, as well as the cinematographic atmosphere they project, Last Harbour transports your awareness to the here and now. Listening to their album you are acutely aware of the attention to detail that the band has paid to every part of the album’s creation. Craig perfectly sets the scene:
All their attention to process and the intricacies of their artistic production aid a sound that is unsurprisingly difficult to categorise. Previous attempts to place a pin into it include “swooning dustbowl baroque”, “funeral pop” and “classic outback brooding”. Last Harbour really burst such definitions. This isn’t because they experiment
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with vastly opposing genres, but because they allow themselves to organically stray into whatever sounds suit their content. From the chamber-esque ‘Catherine Rising’ to the frowningly sardonic ‘Replacements’, Last Harbour sweep through styles like they are pulling leaves from the trees they pass as they walk through the wood. Central to this is Kevin Craig’s definitive baritone voice. Directly compared to both Nick Cave and Ian Curtis, it is actually much richer and more ruminative than both. It is the central cog around which their sound revolves or the reel into which they thread their film. This enables them to explore different styles and sounds while maintaining a strong aural narrative. Recording and producing the album, Last Harbour took full advantage of this. As well as their usual instrumental line-up, a variety of analogue synths were introduced (a musical dream for a synth-head like me). Also, as intended, the location influenced many of the sounds they sourced. “The church organ was used (although it was out of pitch, with broken valves). We ended up using the sound of it being turned off. Sam used the building and microphone placement to capture the odd reverberations. My personal highlight of recording was beating a 7-foot length of metal ducting with my fists for three minutes. We wanted a really harsh metallic sounding crash. It ended up sounding fairly physical.” The entire album has a very physical quality; from the
heart emblem on the cover/website and associated material, through the sounds they use into the very physical and human themes they explore. “How we wrote the album did become an element of what the album is about. So, I think the sense of being isolated and how you deal with that is kind of thematic throughout. 'If You Mean To Be Lost' came from our walking deep into the woods around the cottage and how dreamy and distant that felt. While other songs are a little more like camp-fire stories or older, folklore affairs.” This explains how Last Harbour seem to stand outside of time while simultaneously encouraging your consciousness into the immediacy of life around you.
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Their themes are ultimately human and timeless. ‘Your heart, it carries the sound’ is like the hybrid lovechild of Film Noir with ‘The History of the World In 100 Objects’. Their songs successfully play out like films (in which you feel you are living in real-time). Last Harbour then further extend the experience, in which you can fully, artistically immerse yourself, by creating a physical album that is a real delight. “The idea with the artwork for the album was to create an object, which could be explored, with maps, photographs and fold out elements. Making the physical album was always important. We wanted something that was hand-crafted and fairly bespoke, to match what we had done in the recording process. Something we had made.” The result is a beautiful, matt black parcel of musical wonderment – when you open it, you feel like Amelie Poulin does upon discovering the tin in her bathroom. The cover was designed by Craig. “The sleeves were created for us by Eco-Craft, then every one was letterpressed – by hand – by David at Hotbed Press in Salford. It was a painstaking, backbreaking task, by all accounts. The inserts were also letterpressed, card folded to create an envelope, maps of the recording space and a unique photograph of the church added to each package… We felt that if someone was going to buy this album, we should make it as beautiful as we possibly could.”
They have certainly succeeded in this. ‘Your heart, it carries the sound’ is a complete experience, from unwrapping the album to listening to it (on repeat, window open, red wine in hand). Right to the final track, ‘This is how we disappear’, attention is paid to enhancing the listener’s experience. It begins with a music box playing from another century and concludes with, whispering over vinyl crackles: “an Iranian film director (I forget his name right now) talking about his approach and inspirations. It's a simple and interesting mantra that we can all relate to: ‘Everything is poetry’”. ‘Your heart, it carries the sound’ is a powerful, beautiful and deliciously introverted experience of an album. You connect with it physically. Considering its melancholic, reflective tones, Last Harbour have produced an album that is fantastically encouraging and ultimately uplifting. You feel it is a treat to participate in what they have made. “I've always felt that all of the artwork and design aspects are entirely part of the music. Ultimately, it all comes from one group of people. Anything we create as part of that group is an extension of the music. And we really enjoy it.”
Your heart, it carries the sound, is released via Little Red Rabbit Records. www.lastharbour.co.uk www.littleredrabbit.co.uk
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feature
Typed Art
By Sarah Handyside
Sex sells. Often it shouldn’t but, nevertheless, London’s phone boxes remain papered with something almost as symbolic of the city as their container. So-called ‘tart cards’ – miniature advertisements for local call girls – invite readers to pick up the phone and order teasing and tying up, whips and chains, massages and more. The crude cartoons and plays on the word ‘cum’ may not be high art, but they are pervasive, occasionally pretty, and an influence behind a surprising range of mainstream artists. The iconic cut-up lettering of the Sex Pistols’ designs owes much to the bold graphics and seedy undertone of these cards, as does Tom Phillips’ melting together of word and image.
But the tart card has become more than an influence on others – it is an accidental artwork in itself, Marcel Duchamp’s objet trouvé (found object). It is the subject of research, historical and cultural interest and discussion. Website The Typographic Hub proclaims that ‘to anyone interested in printing and graphic design the cards form a microcosm of evolving typographic tastes and techniques’, and whilst one of their most appealing elements in terms of aesthetic critique is undoubtedly the marriage of graphic and type, tart cards go further than this. That typographic element means that language is as inherent to these intriguing objects as image; they are a microcosm not merely of cultural evolution but also of multiple forms. Word and image meet here, and in an arena refreshingly free of pretension.
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Chris Thelwell
Matt Joyce
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John Rooney
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Their crudeness, in fact, is the key to their persistent intrigue. So deceptively simple are tart cards, so joyful in their not taking themselves too seriously (these cards have a straightforward commercial purpose, after all), that they offer an unusual window into criticism and interpretation. Numerous art groups and schools, galleries and websites have taken it upon themselves to explore the phenomenon. A simple internet search throws up a spectrum from coy ‘playschools for naughty boys’ to ‘brunette bondage bitches’, touching on more unusual tastes (‘get a buzz at Madame Electronique’s’) along the way. Likewise, the internet displays a plethora of competitions to find new takes on the tart card, applying the economies of space and detail, the wry mix of humour and sordidness, the bold graphics and colour to new formats. Earlier this year, the University of Salford’s School of Art and Design similarly called for artists to ‘find the tart hidden in every type’, creating tart cards specifically for either a typeface or a letter of the alphabet. John Rooney, who organised the exhibition, was keen for it to reflect the swiftly developing technology on the world of typography as well as that of the tart card. “I reasoned that this kind of service would now be offered to clients online,” he explains, skirting around the ‘professional services’ offered by tart cards’ owners. It’s a clever turn of phrase, touching on the numerous other ‘professional service’s at play here, from designers through
to printers, and reminding us again of the commercial and the mercantile that are central to this art. And of course, where is commercialisation more evident than in the world of technology, that which we both consume and use to consume? As such, the Type Tarts exhibition was originally showcased at the school’s MediaCity base on an interactive digital display. “I wanted to reflect this change of delivery from the physical to the virtual in the way we would present the cards produced by Salford. I briefed Christine Charnock, a Digital Media student at Salford to develop an interactive digital display to present the Salford cards,” adds John. “Overall I was really pleased with the quantity and quality of the cards we created for the exhibition. Once up in the exhibition space, the screen-based work compliments the framed prints really well, and offers the viewer another way of interacting with the exhibition content.” The Type Tarts exhibition now resides permanently in the St Bride Library permanent collection. Submissions range from quirky puns (all over my Baskerville Old Face, anyone?) to illustrative representations of letters: splayed legs become a line of Vs; a woman’s crotch is reduced to a simple Y. Humour abounds – the ever-vilified Comic Sans is ‘just not my type’ – but the underlying discomfort and disturbance of this most abnormal, subversive of art forms is always present.
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The real intrigue of tart cards is the complexity of the responses they engender – their very name purposefully grinds and vibrates against straightforward discourses of women, sex, transactions. How do we feel about the word tart? Is it simply a crass and sexist term that ought to provoke reactions of disgust and abhorrence alone? Is it also – reasonably – a little titillating? Is it amusing, and, if so, can we sit comfortably with our own amusement? Is there real power at play, or only the suggestion of it? And so, is it acceptable for us to admire the creative and the clever here, the puns that can slyly lift a lip, the caricatures that happily hint at other eras as well as other sex lives? How do we really feel about Marcel Duchamp’s theory of the objet trouvé when the object is that which we object to, and are we willing to stretch Andy Warhol’s art of commerce to the commercialisation of women’s bodies? These are questions that we ought to ask of ourselves, while enjoying the very process of asking. That tart cards can provoke all those questions is a measure of their unexpected power. John Rooney and the University of Salford are incredibly timely in taking their explorations into digital formats, because tart cards look set to persevere in that environment too. If London’s iconic phone boxes one day vanish, it seems almost certain that somewhere, somehow, these cards, and their unpretentious melting together of word and image, will remain.
For now, blankpages can only send you to one of the many outposts, physical or digital, where people have delved a little deeper into this cranny of the art world, and search for the (t)art hidden in every type. usir.salford.ac.uk/20647/ studentdesigners.com/christinecharnock/type_tarts_exhibition
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Michael Thorp
Simon Meredith
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blankpicks
Louis Barabbas
Like many blogs, Keyhole Observations was established as a place for the author to let off a bit of carefully filtered steam. The content mostly reflects on developments in the creative industries at a time some people are describing as The End and others The Beginning. I usually reach one of two conclusions on this subject: 1) Now is a truly fascinating time to be carving out a creative niche for oneself, and 2) Now is a truly terrifying time to be carving out a creative niche for oneself.
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Sample Post - Click here
Louis Barabbas recommends:
On my crueller days I stick the knife into lazy PR campaigns, half-baked self-promotion and witless hype. When I’m feeling relatively positive, however, I don’t shy away from the sentimental. I am a great believer in the unifying power of art and, though frequently cynical in tone, I like to use my little platform to expound on the virtues of collaboration and networks. What I loathe particularly is the competition associated with the music business – the poisonous mythology of “making it”, the pornography of popularity contests and the machinery of celebrity – all infecting our popular view of performance-based careers. louisbarabbas.tumblr.com
Alabaster de Plume "Tonight From I ron Mountain" alabasterdeplume.com/tonight-from-iron-mountain Alabaster de Dlume is on the one hand a busy tenor saxophonist for a number of highly regarded projects across the UK (including Honeyfeet and Liz Green) and on the other he is a poet/songwriter of rare ability and nuance. His blog is an absolute joy, possessed of a unique perspective and irresistible humour, he topples pomposity wherever he encounters it, but more often with a carefully placed banana peel than bloody coup d’etat. All bands/artists are encouraged to keep blogs these days – precious few make theirs worthy of the term Art. Alabaster is utterly unique and so, naturally, is his blog.
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Cover Artist
Michael Barrow
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y work is a comment on the world around me. I work quickly and without too much thought, admittedly. The ‘decisive moment’ is spontaneous and none dramatic. My photography, in addition to other work, has always come as a result of my intrigue into context and the subjective nature of the human ‘self’ in that context. I’m fascinated by the idea of lives that coexist, without ever really joining. I think it brings a great sense of isolation and I try to mirror this in each shot. I don’t always like the idea of using people in my shots,
but sometimes it just works. It’s space and almost the suggestion of a human presence at some point that I tend to dwell on. I try to keep my work simple and unedited, working from a strict interest into my everyday working class surroundings, finding beauty and intrigue in the curious and relentless narratives of the quotidian. I think within photography there is a great deal of importance contained within empty space. I try not to bombard a viewer with stimulus. Sometimes what’s not in a shot is more important, more suggestive.
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Michael Barrow (b.1987) is a Photographer and Artist hailing from the North West of England. After graduating in 2010, with Honours, from the University College Falmouth, Michael has continued to work with a range of film and digital, photographic and lens based media in addition to drawing and painting. Gaining a recognised Associateship Distinction from the Royal Photographic Society (www.rps.org) in February 2011, Michael continues to work spontaneously and candidly, taking inspiration and influence from the photojournalist, reportage styles of Magnum Photographers, forever intrigued with the lives and contexts within his Greater Manchester home.
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Forthcoming
Events
Inside BLANKSPACE, Mancester Runs until 29 April Free Within the insular and atmospheric setting of BLANKSPACE gallery, Inside explores the psychological connections we form with our environment, placing the participant within a collection of works that disturb, envelop, and engage. All the works featured in this exhibition are united by themes of absence, loss, memory, fantasy and nostalgia, sparking the imagination and placing the participant both physically and mentally within the viewing space. To accompany the exhibition, there is also a hand-made publication featuring short prose and poetry inspired by the exhibition themes. Collating the work of twelve emerging writers, each of the pieces creates a perfect accompaniment to the exhibition experience. Participating artists: Claudia Borgna, Philip Cheater, Drop Collective, Gill Greenhough, Rosie Leventon, David Ogle, Emily Rubner, Liz West and Chris Wright blankmediacollective.org/inside
Poets & Players Whitworth Art Gallery 7 April, 2pm – 4pm Free Known for its imaginative programming of complementary arts - poetry with music, dance and visual art - and with newer writers showcased alongside established poets and musicians, the next Poets and Players event at the Whitworth features Marius Kochiejowski, Janine Pinion and Jeremy Over, with music by Jinny Shaw (oboist with the Hallé) and friends. poetsandplayers.co/ Word of Warning Sampler Series Tom Marsham & GETINTHEBACKOFTHEVAN Zion Arts Centre, Manchester 20 April, 7.30pm £8/£5 Continuing Hab Arts’ brave and important work in spite of the closure of a major emerging contemporary performance venue last year in Manchester, Word of Warning’s Sampler Series is a great opportunity to see new and challenging work, sometimes with a name you know, more often names you don’t, but should. wordofwarning.org
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Magic Words Bramsche, Todmorden 10 April, 7.30pm £3
Ting-Tong Chang Chinese Art Centre, Mancester 4 - 17 April Free
An exciting new spoken word night. Guest poets & performers, plus a warm & friendly open mic spot open to all! Hosted by writer & performer Emma Decent. Guests for April: punk poet, Cayn White, the binary Karen Alderson & pagan & powerful, Freda Davis.
Ting-Tong Chang is a Taiwanese, UK based artist who graduated with an MFA from Goldsmiths, London in 2011. Ting-Tong’s practice combines street art with more traditional elements of painting and sculpture. Ting-Tong often uses absurd objects or visual imagery as a method to open a dialogue about contemporary problems. These core issues include globalisation stimulated by developments in technology, blurred boundaries between nations, consumer culture, and ‘omniscient fear of terrorism’. For his residency here, Ting-Tong will be working with local street artists to explore the role of advertising, and how it plays on our beliefs and consumer desires. He will also be working on a new ‘sculptural device’ which plays around with the idea of upcycling street litter and degradable waste.
www.bramsche.co.uk Cheltenham Poetry Festival 2012 Various Venues, Cheltenham 18 – 22 April Prices start at £5 With 95 performers over 5 days, including TV Presenter and poet Owen Sheers, Hip-hop star Dizraeli, Cheltenham Comedy Festival headliner Monkey Poet, acclaimed poet Penelope Shuttle, slam-champs Ash Dickinson and Jack Dean, the animation and poetry show Under Stokes Croft, a showcase of poets from Worcester Literary Festival, a four team slam, prize winning poet Cliff Yates, a touring show by Martin Figura entitled Whistles, Helen Ivory, Helen Mort, James Bunting, ‘The Brewery Bard’ Barnaby EatonJones, Bobby Parker, Dan Burt, Alison Brackenbury and much more, Whether you are serious about poetry or just serious about having fun, there is sure to be something to inspire and delight. cheltenhampoetryfest.co.uk
chinese-arts-centre.org
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