Degradation and decay, if they’re not the intent, are pretty awful things, but if you’re in a good enough mood it can be quite affirming.
It’s probably a few weeks too late for this to actually be of interest to anyone, and for many of you, you won’t have visited any part of Independents Biennial, so the context here is meaningless. But bear with me.
In May, we were trying to come up with ideas for signposting Independents Biennial venues, and the budget was on its knees, so it was a bit of a scramble for bits of stuff. At one point we were going to do flags, but the venues reminded us that flag poles aren’t a normal thing outside galleries.
Instead, we ended up with about a dozen 8×4 sheets of (very) used MDF. They were the old walls of the Lady Lever Art Gallery, and covered in layers of paint, and vinyl lettering. Masked sections of coloured walls, under layers of green, white and black emulsion shone out as these minor piece of local history that most would consider un-worth remembering. But they were.
The sheets got cut down and turned into A-Boards, against a lot of advice on the basic principle that keeping a load of MDF boards tied together with rope outside all summer would undoubtedly lead to mush.
Anyway, the green paint, I’ve imagined since, was probably the base colour for the Flower Fairies Show in 2023. I’m probably wrong, but I’ve spent months staring at these A-boards, and they tell a story – possibly a fiction.
Regardless of what each layer was from, they served the Lady Lever for years, saw countless visitors pass through. They were ready for the skip, and now they aren’t. And all but one survived the summer.
That one, now dried out, but severely misshapen, lives by my desk. It’s a marker that failures can be successes. That context matters. But, less ethereally, that building a festival programme doesn’t need to cost the earth. Materials don’t need to be bought at cost, and they don’t need to end up back in landfill.
Stuff is never just stuff. Over the next few months we’ll start sharing a new project that’s come out of the festival, focussed on exactly this – ensuring that stuff is valued, and that stuff is stored, and that stuff is available to those who need it.
Occasionally it will reach the end of its life, like this bleak A-Board with my bag hung over it. But it will have had its life extended.
And, sometimes, degradation by mistake is absolutely part of the beauty of trying new things.
Later this month, you can, and should, go to 1 Hamilton Square, the home of Birch Studios & Gallery and Hamilton Vault. It was one of the most active venues in Independents Biennial this year, and also the home of Landlines Studio. From 16th – 18th October, the flags they flew from New Brighton’s Fort Perch Rock, using pigment from around the fort, go back on display in their final state, after flying against the wind, salt and sea throughout summer.
On the 16th, there’s a launch event and talk by the artists and Doug Darroch on the history of the fort, and the process of making art work from it (book tickets via www.linktr.ee/Landlinesstudio)
At the outset, no one expected the flags to look like they did at the end, but that’s absolutely part of the magic of interacting and retaining a relationship with the place they’re from.