Posts by sfletcher

‘Melt’ (2020)
Pat Flynn
Digital video

Part of the Spring micro-commission series

“My work for the micro commission takes its starting point from a body of work that I created a few years ago, the Cheese series, some of which is now in the University of Salford Art Collection. (I was somewhat uncomfortable using my own practice as a beginning, but equally would have struggled with the problems of using someone else’s work as a source or starting point.)

For some time now I’ve wanted to engage with new fluid dynamics software. And the micro commission afforded me this opportunity. The premise for my work for the micro commission was a simple one. Through the use of fluid dynamics software, to get a computer to simulate the melting of an object that I’d made in a previous artwork. (Original artwork, ‘Stacked Cheese’, 2015)

So, I got the computer to melt an assemblage of virtual minimal cheese.

My thinking was, in effect I would change the original artwork from a type of ‘east coast minimalist’ aesthetic to a ‘west coast minimalist’ one. From John McCracken to an outcome that would resemble something more like a Lynda Benglis.

Anyone who enjoys mainstream cinema will be aware of the 3D software and it’s accompanying fluid dynamics software that I use. (It is used in films such as the Harry Potter series or any of the recent Marvel films.) This software is fully capable of simulating the movement of all manner of fluids, from large body liquids like a sea, river, waterfall. To smaller scale liquid from a tap or glass, blood, paint or metal, to gases, smoke, cloud and fire.

In terms of the future and as a direct result of receiving the micro commission, I have already begun two new works that involve the use of the fluid dynamics software.” 

– Pat Flynn

Watch the new video below:
(click the arrows in the bottom right for full screen)
Duration: 1m38s

“The context of the pandemic is perhaps a good moment for pause and reflection of the reality – or surreality – of the world around us. For the Art Collection, Flynn’s re-interpretation is a mischievous and playful encounter, which highlights the fact that contemporary collections are not necessarily fixed objects but are living, moving, changeable things”

– Stephanie Fletcher, Assistant Curator:

Pat Flynn is an artist based in Greater Manchester. His realistic, digitally-rendered work focuses on “how we understand ourselves in light of mass media and commodity: the seduction, security, rituals and belief systems that transpire from mass production and consumer culture”. His work draws on ideologies, processes, themes and sentiments found in Hollywood films, computer games, consumer goods and advertising.

patflynn.co.uk

We’re pleased to share that the moving image work Song for Armageddon by Nick Crowe and Ian Rawlinson is now screening online at the FORMA website.

Filmed on location at Tel Megiddo, the biblical site of Armageddon in Israel, the film is ‘situated between the real and the fictional’: “In an age of Trump, Putin and climate change, with globalisation and wars – civil and otherwise – racking the globe, this work is a chance to return to the source of ‘end times’ iconography. Armageddon is a nexus of metaphysics and geopolitics.” – Nick Crowe and Ian Rawlinson

Accompanying the screening is a new interview with the artists, discussing the work’s original intentions and potential for new meaning in the wake of Covid 19.

Visit the Forma website to watch online

Commissioned by the University of Salford Art Collection and Forma, in association with BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art. Supported by Arts Council England.

4th August 2020

‘Unexpected Salford’ (2020)
Jesse Glazzard
Digital zine

Click here, or on the image below, to view the zine full screen.

Jesse Glazzard is an artist originally from West Yorkshire. His work deals with class, sexuality and gender politics; in an intimate reflection of the LGBT+ community.

He graduated from BA Fashion Image Making and Styling at the University of Salford in 2018. After taking part in our Graduate Scholarship scheme, he has gone on to a successful photographic practice – with clients including Vice, Dazed, and i-D magazines.

For this micro-commission, Jesse has revisited and reflected on his own body of photographic work made in 2018:

“The work aims to look back on how Salford changed my life, and how the struggles were over come from a present version of myself…this work gives me time to really reconnect with a place that pushed me to be where I am today.
“It felt good to feel completely free in this commission – often it’s hard for this to happen. I felt like I spoke some of my truths and my memories from Salford.”

www.jesseglazzard.com

Part of our Salford SPRING Micro-commissions programme, find out more & view other works here.

Read more about Glazzard’s work in our collection: LGBT+ Letters

Year: 2018-19
Medium: Film photography
Dimensions: variable
Brief biography: b. 1993, Halifax. Currently lives & works in London

Jesse Glazzard is an artist from West Yorkshire. His work deals with class, sexuality and gender politics; in an intimate reflection of the “LGBT+ community and way beyond that”.

In 2017, he founded Moist Collective, a space for queer womxn and non-binary artists to show their work. Up until now, he has focused on film photography and self-portraiture – in December 2019 he put on Porridge, an intimate exhibition of self-portraits taken with his girlfriend Nora Nord.

Glazzard graduated from BA Fashion Image Making and Styling at the University of Salford in 2018. After taking part in our Graduate Scholarship scheme, he has gone on to a successful photographic practice – with clients including Vice, Dazed, and i-D magazines.

The LGBT+ Letters series

Artist Statement:
Jesse’s own coming-out at secondary school was fraught with the fear, and harsh reality, of violent backlash. But it was also hampered by what Glazzard saw as a complete lack of queer visibility. He had simply no experience of how to become queer. Glazzard’s first cultural experience of queer romance was of a single ‘chaste, lesbian kiss’ on the popular soap opera EastEnders at the age of 9.

While LGBTQI representation in popular culture has improved, Glazzard describes still seeing many stale stereotypes, which this photographic work seeks to rectify. LGBT+ Letters is an attempt at providing, through portraits and texts, queer aesthetics for people who find themselves without meaningful representation in the world. In the photography series, Glazzard demonstrates a lack of self-indulgence rather a strong belief in accommodating to his subjects’ individualities, and ultimately to build trust, capture intimacy, educate and inform.

Selected images:

Jesse Glazzard, Blake, (2018-2019). Film photograph

Jesse Glazzard, Blake, (2018-19). Photograph

University of Salford Art Collection Covid Commissions #4: Parham Ghalamdar with Castlefield Gallery

The University of Salford is delighted to announce Parham Ghalamdar as the fourth of six artists selected for new commissions for the Collection – aiming to capture contemporary experiences during the pandemic, as well as supporting artists who may have otherwise lost work.

Ghalamdar has been commissioned in partnership with Castlefield Gallery to make new work for the University of Salford Art Collection. Birds or Borders is the title of a short film created using stop-motion techniques, drawing, and collages of found footage. The film engages with socio-political subjects such as freedom of movement, in a poetic approach to depicting a state of suspension, a situation which most people have experienced during the Covid-19 disruptions.  In order to animate such a subject, the film attempts to explore the medium of time by proposing an “Absurdist anti-narrative structure of story-telling where there are no punch lines to any of the sequences.”

Ghalamdar says about the work:

“The “Birds or Borders” is objectively exploring the medium of expanded painting and drawing, stretched out with digital tools and heavily influenced by the Soviet Montage Theories. The object is to accumulate and communicate information in a disciplined manner.

The subject of the work is borrowed from the Covid-19 disruptions. During the lock down each and every one of us has experienced a unique context in lack of freedom of movement: people were not authorized to leave their houses. However the restriction of movement is nothing new. Asylum seekers, refugees, immigrants and people holding week passports have been dealing with life-threatening forms of such limitations; Trump’s travel ban is perhaps an radical example of it. Hopefully this situation would result in having more sympathy with each other.”

Birds or Borders (2020), stills from animation.

Stephanie Fletcher, Assistant Curator, University of Salford Art Collection says:

“The politics and policing of ‘borders’ are perhaps now more in focus than ever in light of the multiple global upheavals around us: from Brexit and asylum policy, to the climate crisis and Covid 19. Parham’s careful and timely work explores the concurrent experiences of urgency and delay at the border: a frustrating sense of only being able to watch and wait for uncertain futures. His recent animation work is an exciting development in his practice, and the commissioned video will be a valuable addition to our permanent Collection”

Helen Wewiora, Director of Castlefield Gallery adds:

“I first encountered Parham’s work at his degree show where I selected him to join our mentee scheme at Castlefield Gallery. I was immediately struck by his vibrant colour palette and the surreal forms that dominate his paintings. Parham’s work is bold and confident, yet has a delicate sensibility that touches you, and for me personally his work never tires. The more I have got to know Parham during his time with the gallery, the more interesting I have found his practice, and I was delighted to hear about his recent experiments with animation, a medium he had been thinking about for some time but lockdown had catalysed in him turning his attention to. I was amazed at how quickly Parham was mastering animation and working with the moving image, seamlessly bringing together his passion for drawing and painting without compromise, into the digital realm. For me this was another example of Parham’s clear commitment to practice, and demonstrates his approach to applying creative solutions to the challenges that life throws at us, something we might all learn from.”

The full video will be released online in August 2020, then exhibited at our New Adelphi Exhibition Gallery in our 2021 programme.

Ghalamdar is an Iranian-born painter, animator, researcher, and curator based in Manchester. He is currently pursuing his MA Painting at Manchester School of Art. Oil painting and drawing are at the core of his practice which explores the histories and traditions of Western painting to create disciplined images. Due to the Covid-19 disruptions and inaccessibility to the studio, he has been exploring digital medias such as creating stop motion animations based on drawings and found footage collages.
https://www.ghalamdar.com/

For the past few months, Professor Jackie Kay CBE, University Chancellor and Scots Makar, has been writing and recording a series of poems every Sunday and sharing them with colleagues, students and members of the public.

Each week we have brought to you Jackie’s latest poem and this week will be the last poem in this lockdown series. ‘Darling’ was written in memory of Jackie’s friend Julia Darling who passed away a number of years ago, and Jackie dedicates this poem to anyone who has lost someone close to them.

‘Darling’

You might forget the exact sound of her voice

Or how her face looked when sleeping.

You might forget the sound of her quiet weeping

Curled into the shape of a half moon,

When smaller than her self, she seemed already to be leaving

Before she left, when the blossom was on the trees

And the sun was out, and all seemed good in the world.

I held her hand and sang a song from when I was a girl –

Heil Ya Ho Boys, Let her go Boys

And when I stopped singing she had slipped away,

Already a slip of a girl again, skipping off,

Her heart light, her face almost smiling.

And what I didn’t know, or couldn’t see then,

Was that she hadn’t really gone.

The dead don’t go till you do, loved ones.

The dead are still here holding our hands.

Copyright Jackie Kay. Reprinted with kind permission from the author.

Although this is Jackie’s last Sunday poem, you can still catch ‘Makar to Makar’ every Thursday at 7.00pm. Read more about ‘Makar to Makar’ here.

You can also revisit all of the poems from the weekly series, which started in April, here on our website.

Keep up-to-date with Jackie on Twitter @JackieKayPoet.

We are pleased to announce the third in a series of new commissions during Summer, as part of a wider programme of support for artists during Covid 19.

Update: September 2021:

The artist is withdrawing from completing A Tale as Old as Time due to allegations of institutional racism at CFCCA. He is part of a group of artists calling for a defunding of the organisation.

Although his experience of working with the University of Salford Art Collection is positive, he feels the commission is currently untenable because the wider University is represented on the board of CFCCA.

Image: Grandville, J. and Forest, E. (1839-1842). Commerce Anglais. Lithograph, asset no. 106779001. © The Trustees of the British Museum. https://www.britishmuseum.org/collection/image/106779001. Translation: “You must buy this poison immediately. We want you to really poison yourselves, so that we will have enough tea to comfortably digest our beefsteaks!”

Artist Jack Tan has been commissioned by the University of Salford Art Collection to create Tale As Old As Time, a series of Bone China afternoon tea sets inspired by a 19th century tradition of British ceramics that commemorated major public disasters on functional pottery. As a contemporary iteration, this work highlights particular moments of disaster in Chinese civil rights history that tend to be overlooked in the broader Black and Asian histories as well as the official canons of Chinese history in the United Kingdom.

The tea set designs are inspired by a selection of tragic events from Chinese civil rights history in the UK over the last 200 years, notably: the Opium (or Tea) Wars (1839-60); the deported and disappeared Chinese seamen from Liverpool (late 1940s); the violent murders of takeaway workers Simon Tang (2013) and Migao Chen (2005); the mass Chinese deaths at Morecambe Bay (2004), Dover (2000) and Essex (2019); and the racialised response to the Foot & Mouth (2001) and Covid-19 (2020) epidemics.

Drawn together in this work, Tale As Old As Time makes visible a number of consistent themes and stresses experienced by the Chinese community over the years: isolation, vulnerability, rural racism, subjection to racist legislation, racial violence and murder, disposability of Chinese bodies and labour, and the association of Chineseness with disease. While these disasters do not exist in isolation from the struggles of the wider British Black and Asian communities, they draw attention to how overt and institutional racism manifests particularly for the Chinese in the UK.

The work will be ‘activated’ in 2021 as a ‘Chinese Civil Rights Tea Party’. Acting as conversation starters, the tea sets will invite participants into a performativity of tea-drinking and discussion which investigates contradictions in British politics, law and society today.

Artist Jack Tan says:

“Very often Chinese, East and Southeast Asian communities are viewed as trouble-free and inoffensive in Britain. We are good minorities because we work hard and ‘keep ourselves to ourselves’ I’ve heard it said. But our experience of racism is no less fraught or tragic or long; it is one where this inoffensiveness or politeness becomes both how we are perceived and also the manner through which we experience discrimination.”

An element of the work will be shared online later in July 2020. The final artwork will be displayed in the New Adelphi Exhibition Gallery, University of Salford at a date to be confirmed in 2021.

Lindsay Taylor, University of Salford Art Collection Curator, says:

“When building the Collection our aim is to tell a story of now to future generations. Covid-19 has been, and indeed remains a challenging time for many, and we want to reflect a number of stories of this time within our Collection. Jack’s work will encourage audiences to consider some of the important and uncomfortable histories within the UK. It will be a valuable addition to our permanent Collection”

Professor Jackie Kay CBE, University Chancellor and Scots Makar, is sharing a series of poems with colleagues, students and members of the public, reflecting on the current period of uncertainty that we are in.

This week, we are sharing Jackie’s poem ‘Welcome Wee One’, to welcome all of the babies who have come into the world in the last few months but also sparing a thought for relatives who have not yet met the new babies in their families due to current social distancing restrictions. 

‘Welcome Wee One’

O ma darlin wee one

At last you are here in the wurld

And wi’ aa your wisdom

Your een bricht as the stars,

You’ve filled this hoose with licht,

Yer trusty wee haun, your globe o’ a heid, 

My cherished yin, my hert’s ain!

O ma darlin wee one

The hale wurld welcomes ye:

The mune glowes; the hearth wairms.

Let your life have luck, health, charm,

Ye are my bonny blessed bairn,

My small miraculous gift.

I never kent luve like this.​​​​​​​

Published in BANTAM, reprinted with kind permission of Picador Publishers.

Don’t miss Jackie’s weekly series of online literary and musical performances. ‘Makar to Makar’ will showcase a line-up of established talent and emerging voices from Scotland and around the world. Read more about ‘Makar to Makar’ here.

Follow Jackie on Twitter @JackieKayPoet to hear a new poem every Sunday.

July 2020

Following our virtual support sessions for contemporary visual artists applying to ACE Emergency Funding, we’re pleased to offer further bookable online studio visits for practitioners based in Greater Manchester & the North West.

The informal sessions last for around 45-60 minutes, and have recently included: reviewing CVs, statements and websites, discussing professional practice, supporting bid-writing, and opportunities to talk about your latest projects or new directions in your practice.

We are a small team but have a range of experience between us. We can only offer a limited number of sessions – but we’d be very happy to hear from you and look forward to finding out more about your work.

Micro-commission #1: Katie Tomlinson

‘The Wanderers’ (2020)
Katie Tomlinson
50 x 60cm, Oil on Canvas

The Wanderers (2020) is a response to Figures by a Fence (1922) by Adolphe Valette. Although, Valette created this painting almost 100 years ago, the painting holds new significance when reflecting on our current climate.

Adolphe Valette, Figures by a Fence, 1922. Photograph: Photography North West.

Once the government announced lockdown I found myself enjoying hobbies that I hadn’t had time for in years – baking, gardening, and most importantly, walking. For most, the ritual of a daily walk became a silver lining, and Valette’s painting depicts just this; A content and peaceful couple enjoying a moment with nature.

My response, ‘The Wanderers,’ is a depiction of one of the many idyllic Greater Manchester settings that I have immersed myself in, during my government approved daily exercise, whilst in lockdown. I especially enjoyed long walks along the banks of the River Mersey, whilst I filled my phone with amateur photographs of tall trees, wild garlic and cute dogs.

Part of our Salford SPRING Micro-commissions programme, find out more & view other works here.

Katie lives and works in Manchester, and is currently a studio holder at Paradise Works. Recent exhibitions include: Happy Ending at Bunker Gallery (Manchester) Spilling out with Castlefield Gallery at The Manchester Contemporary, and More T’North at the Harris Museum & Art Gallery (Preston).
https://www.katietomlinson.co.uk/info