National Museums Liverpool at 40
If you were born in the market town of Ormskirk in Lancashire, like me, you end up with either a strong Scouse accent, a distinctive Lancashire accent or in the case of my friends and family, no real accent whatsoever. One of my aunties tells me that after nine years living in London mine has become even more diluted and a former flatmate remarks that the only word which gives the game away as to my origins is the word ‘up’. Just over ten miles north of Liverpool, Ormskirk enjoys close ties to the city and it was here that both sets of grandparents were born. However, if you travel back further into the family’s history, my surname has its origins in Ukraine.
With these strong links, plus my love of Euro-pop and a deep interest in travel and global interconnection, the arrival of 2023’s Eurovision Song Contest to Liverpool was an excuse for me to create an ambitious new artwork.
My work over the years has drawn on the model of the rhizome as proposed by the French Philosophers Deleuze and Guattari: a word whose Greek origin literally means a ‘mass of roots’. It’s this expanding, underground structure that helps me think through the work that I make: each a response to a specific place in the world, together forming something larger and unseen with all sorts of connections existing between each.
Site-specific, my artworks are often pairs of spectacles which I first wear in-situ and which are then shown in the gallery as either a wall-based painting or a free-standing sculpture. Originally lightweight and small, these have grown over the years as my engineering capabilities and ambition have improved. For Liverpool, I made my biggest yet: not a pair of glasses but a whole headdress.
On the day of the Grand Final, I wore this artwork – a model of the city’s Liver Building with my face painted as the Ukraine flag – and wandered the city streets. This gained a lot of attention and –despite the Police refusing it entry to the official Fan Zone – it was eventually picked up by the Museum of Liverpool who added it to their collection in late 2023.
Last week, I received an email from one of the museum’s curators, informing me that it will be going on display in Liverpool’s World Museum from April 3rd until the end of February 2027. If you’re in Liverpool whilst the show is running do go in and see it for yourself.
2023’s artwork worn in-situ
Rock, Paper, Scissors
I was sat in Cinema 1 at the Barbican Centre yesterday morning as part of the bi-monthly All Teams Meeting led by new CEO Abigail Pogson. In a minority of only a handful of zero-hour casuals, I took a seat somewhere near the back of the tiered cinema beside a fellow Tour Guide on one side and a fellow Gallery Invigilator on the other. Everyone else, it seemed, were highly-paid, high ranking members of Barbican staff: Curators, Managers and more ‘Heads Of’ than I care to remember, all wielding coffees and pastries and hysterical, it seemed, at being let out of their offices.
After sitting through more than an hour of business-talk, I was suddenly stirred into action upon seeing one of my paintings appear on the huge screen in front of the several hundred-strong audience. It turns out that one of my paintings has been selected to go on show in the Barbican. Not the galleries, before you get excited – the offices. But it’s a start and preferable to the work staying put in the studio.
In other Barbican-related news, I’ve been continuing work on my ongoing project to construct a wearable scale model of the estate’s Shakespeare Tower.
Today I worked my way through the large pile of corrugated card on the studio floor: cutting pieces into 4cm and 1cm strips. Standing at over half a metre tall and representing twelve of the 43 storeys, it’s currently weighing in at just under two-and-a-half kilos. Some quick maths tells me that the full model will stand almost two metres tall (around 3.5 metres when worn) and it will weigh around 9 kilos. I’m making it one level at a time to make sure it is structurally sound, each level taking approximately two-and-a-half hours to build.
When complete, it will be shown as part of an exhibition that I’m curating at St Gabriel’s Church, Walthamstow as part of the annual E17 Art Trail. This exhibition is bringing together nine contemporary artists who I have selected from across Scotland, Wales and England, all of whom have practices which uses cardboard and paper—materials commonly associated with impermanence. Works will be exhibited amongst the stone pillars of the church building and underneath a canopy of over a thousand paper angels made by the congregation of the church. Here, a dialogue between fragile, often transient objects and an architecture designed for endurance is invited to take place.
The exhibition will be open on Saturday June 13th and Saturday June 20th. All welcome.
Dates for your diary: April to July
Dates for your diary
1) April 3rd: National Museums Liverpool at 40 show opens.
2) May 15th: solo exhibition at Nomas* Poster Space, Dundee.
3) June 13th, 20th: Rock, Paper, Scissors; group show as part of E17 Art Trail
4) Late July: Mangia Mangia solo exhibition at Three Colt Gallery, London.