Charlie Morrissey

I worked with Charlie over the course of two days spent at his Wainsgate Dance Studios with a set of painted objects I travelled to the space with by train and bike. I wanted to bring portable objects which could be moved amongst and which addressed the floor of Charlie’s space directly as the central feature in any dance studio. This work together led to a set of solo responses with the same objects around various outdoor spaces in Manchester, Salford and Stockport. This in turn became the basis of a piece called ‘Painting is a Working Thing’ which folds edits of both sets of films into a wall based construction along with the original painted objects. This work springs from a desire at the time to only make painted objects which can be used as tools for further investigation. The value of the painted objects is found in their usefulness, and they remain ready to work further as the project continues.
http://www.charliemorrissey.com/ 

Sara M. T. Richter-Höhlich

Sara and I worked together for just over a week as part of her exchange residency between Proforma, Manchester and Art Festival Begehungen, Chemnitz. We opened our collaboration with several visits to central Manchester because Sara had never visited the city before. We eventually settled on the idea of putting elements of Manchester and Chemnitz into conversation with each other through a set of performances against greenscreen, which we transferred onto a range of sites across both cities. Presenting ourselves as a set of public statues across a range of locations, we explored ideas around what it is to feel out of place in a strange town. The work culminated in a video based installation which spoke to the cities’ shared history of textiles production.
​https://www.smt-richter.com/

Sarah Simpkin, Sean Roy-Parker and Sian Norris

These three short collaborations came out of a touring group show I was part of which travelled from Manchester (Manchester Contemporary) to London (SET London) and Blackpool (Abingdon Studios). I decided I wanted to make entirely new work for each leg of the show, made in response to each location. Contacting writers Sarah Simpkin and Sian Norris, as well as artist/activist Sean Roy-Parker, all of whom in London at the time, I asked them to take part in the creation of three video collaborative video works. I visited each person during a week spent in London running up to the show there and we spent some time discussing the project. Sarah contributed a reading of a piece of speculative fiction written some years before whilst I wandered around and recorded footage of some landmarks near her home which came up in our conversation. I met Sean at his studio where he tried to teach me how tie a range of knots he had learned as part of a recent workshop whilst we discussed the reasons behind his activism and working methods in an environment I constructed just outside his working space. I met Sian at a hotel she was staying in whilst visiting London for a writing event. She recorded a reading of an unpublished short story she had written recently whilst I recorded her sat amongst a set of monochrome projections I had prepared for the occasion. 
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​https://www.sianthewriter.com/

Charlie Ford

These images come from a short collage based exploratory collaboration Charlie Ford and I undertook to be followed up at a future point. We tried a range of approaches but for these Charlie provided me with some of his body in a stripped back studio setting to investigate through collage. Charlie is a dancer/choreographer/visual artist who I have also worked with under the Rowland’s Leaving project.
https://www.instagram.com/charliejcford/​