Posts tagged: CATALYST

Artist: Elliott Flanagan

Title: A piece of something bigger

Year: 2018

Medium: Digital Video

Duration: 7 minutes, 20 seconds

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Elliott Flanagan is a poet, writer and artist. He was born in Burnley, a post-industrial town in the North of England. His work explores class, subcultures, and personal and social histories. A period spent playing football, working in sales and holiday repping contrasted with a ‘hidden pursuit’ of art via film, music, television, fashion, and rare gallery visits. His work is an exploration of the sometimes jarring intersection between these co-existing lives, and an ongoing dissection of contemporary masculinity.

‘A piece of something bigger’ explores contemporary masculinity through the prism of package holiday culture. Flanagan looks at the ideas entrenched in the male gender stereotype that saturated his youth – misunderstood and under pressure to ‘conform and perform’. The artist studies a tension from his own experience between one’s own consciousness and social expectations.

‘The traditional form of masculinity and its lack of complexity is subverted, as the viewer is party to glimpses of real honesty in the chaos. The film discusses the camaraderie that exists in relationships between men and the value of the communal experience therein.’

With music by William Brown and Ashley Snook.

Artist: Joe Fowler

Title: Call to Industry

Year: 2023

Medium: Digital video

Duration: 5 minutes, 5 seconds

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Joe Fowler is a sound artist with a focus on the marriage of data, sound and visuals for the purpose of digital data conservation. His work includes code manipulation, microsound, sonification, and the deliberate corruption of common software. His work has been exhibited in hi-fi contexts such as TEDx and Jodrell Bank, and lo-fi context such as DIY shows at Islington Mill.

‘Call to Industry’ is a ‘tongue-in-cheek exploration of Manchester’s fetishisation of industrial spaces and history, via a parody cult initiation video for an organisation which worships industry’.

The artist examines the frequent repurpose and reuse of former industrial spaces in the city, which often disregard the dark history of the buildings – including the exploitation and abuse of the working class. He considers the inequalities underlying the Industrial Revolution, which allowed those with enough money and power to continue to exploit those without such privileges. Today, property developers create expensive luxury apartments on the same sites, continuing to lock the working class out of the ability to ‘enjoy the greatest city on earth. Join the cult, worship the ruling class, worship industry…’

Artist: Jack Jameson

Title: Arcadia; Queer by Nature

Year: 2023 – 2024

Medium: Sculpture and accompanying video

Duration: 4 minutes, 44 seconds

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Foraged from scrap,
Yet forged into treasure,
Here floats Arcadia.
A harmonious sanctuary.
Where water seeps,
rock weathers,
And minerals scatter,
Sprouting life.
Retold in this virtual realm of broken binaries and unbridled fantasy,
We prosper in imperfect harmony.
Here… We are one.

Jack Jameson’s work presents a model utopia, inspired by mythology and folklore. In this world nature prevails, and the ‘forest nymph, water siren and rock troll dwell in in harmony – free to be’. The work combines craft, costume, 3D scanning, printing and rendering, photography, and animation.

Jameson is a queer multidisciplinary artist who works across physical and digital mediums to depict ‘unworldly narratives of the queer form… with fantastical narratives or comic depictions’. They see their work as a form of gender performance, and draw inspiration from across sci-fi, fantasy, technology, fashion and queer culture. Previous projects include direction, production design and costume for local film projects, music videos, and commercial campaigns.

Artist: Adam Rawlinson

Title: The birds will sing, that you are part of everything

Year: 2024

Medium: Oil on canvas

Dimensions: H: 200cm W: 160cm

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Rawlinson is an abstract painter primarily working in oils. His work explores the natural world, with a particular focus on lichen – a symbiotic natural organism. He takes interest in their ‘often-unnoticed and underappreciated significance within our ecology, highlighting the extent of our vital relationship with everything that makes up life on earth’.
Using abstraction, gestural mark-making and a range of painterly techniques to ‘give life to’ his paintings, he builds up rich and textural images on large scale canvases. The works seek to manipulate the act and experience of looking; and provide spaces of contemplation and reflection. They form a basis for wider philosophical enquiries, drawing on existentialism and phenomenology, around ‘what it means to be alive’, and what our individual and collective place in the world might be.

Artist: Lizzie King

Title: Belonging

Year: 2021

Medium: C-Type print of 42 individual silver gelatin prints

Accession Number: US2022-04A

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Lizzie King uses analogue and digital printmaking and photography to explore the ‘narratives of our human-centred universe’. This work was one of two pieces commissioned for Rediscovering Salford in 2020, a city-wide project inviting artists to respond to green spaces in the city.

King focussed on Peel Park and the importance of free and open ‘parks for the people’. Demand for public green spaces traces its roots to the Victorian era, and the park is widely recognised as one of the first ever public parks – and the first to be paid for by public subscription. This importance was heightened during the Covid-19 pandemic: while the artist was shielding it was one of the few safe places to visit.

The park bench became an important symbol of rest, relaxation and reflection: ‘The bench asks nothing of the sitter but ‘to be’’. In this work King reverses the roles – the bench itself becomes the ‘sitter’ of a ‘portrait’. Using an elaborate process of photography, engraving, enlarging and digitally combining 42 original images into one composition, the making of the work itself also became a meditative and reflective process.

Artist: Mollie Balshaw

Title: Painting Sandwich #7 & #5

Year: 2019

Medium: Paint on cardboard

Accession Number: US2022-12A,B

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Painting in the expanded field, Balshaw’s work extends beyond the traditional bounds and restrictions of painting, exploring the painting as an ‘object rather than an image’. They consider the deconstruction and reconstruction of structures and surfaces, applying and manipulating thick brushes of brightly coloured paint on – and in between – layers of cardboard in abstract gestures.

Their work also considers the intertwined histories of gender and painting practice, where painting is ‘caught up in a push and pull between femininity and masculinity Identifying as non-binary, I find myself stuck in this whirlwind of tropes, questioning where a painter like me fits amongst the history of painting.’