Homes, Stones, Walks and Windowsills

Macclesfield based artists have responded to the Barnaby 2016 festival theme ‘Space’ with a clutch of fascinating and imaginative proposals including film, photography and embossings.

Submissions were invited from local artists to create public-sited artworks in the town centre to be shown during the festival which will run from 17 -26 June 2016.  Creative interpretations were encouraged and the successful applicants will be commissioned to produce their artworks, funded with support from Arts Council England.

The selection panel comprising Karl Wallace (Barnaby Festival Director), Kwong Lee (Director of Castlefield Gallery, Manchester) and members of the Barnaby Visual Arts Steering Group, unanimously selected four proposals from Tom Baskeyfield and Mario Popham; Hannah Wooll; Rachael King, Val Leer and Mark Helliwell; and Simon Woolham.

Tom Baskeyfield & Mario Popham‘s ‘Shaped By Stone’ will be a dual-site exhibition in Macclesfield and at Tegg’s Nose.  Working from stone logs and scalpings (off-cuts) at the abandoned quarry, plus walls, cobbles and flagstones from the town centre, Tom Baskeyfield will make large-scale graphite embossings. These will sit alongside Mario Popham’s large-format photographs of the two sites.

Hannah Wooll‘s  ‘Engaging With Spaces Through Objects’ will transform unwanted possessions found in Macclesfield’s charity shops, into small-scale artworks in unusual places – the windowsills of six Macclesfield homes!  Hannah Wooll walks everywhere and her eye is often drawn to people’s idiosyncratic window displays of personal objects.  On this unconventional ‘art trail’ the viewer will peer into normally private indoor spaces.

Rachael King, Val Lear & Mark Helliwell‘s ‘No Space Like Home’ multi-media installation will takes the condition, obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD) and the hoarding behaviour it can manifest, as its subject.  Rachael King suffers from OCD and approached the artists to document the ‘decluttering’ process – which she feels is vital to her recovery – through photography and film.  The artworks will include objects, drawings, photography, film and sculpture, to offer a new perspective on the memories of some of Macclesfield’s inhabitants.

Simon Woolham will make a film, Taking-Back-Space: The Macc Walks, to engage young and old by establishing a series of ‘memory walks’ around Macclesfield. This physical and virtual navigation of the town’s streets and spaces will explore the dialogue between walking and memory, space and people.

These four Macclesfield Commissions will be presented alongside the Barnaby Festival Commissions of  new artworks and re-sitings of existing works by national and international artists, details of which will be announced later in the year.

Barnaby Festival Director, Karl Wallace, said: “I am delighted that the festival is supporting the development of home-grown and Macc-based talent in this way.  These four selected projects were stand-out.  We asked for creative and ambitious interpretations of the theme – and that’s what we got!  It is a significant step for Barnaby to commission Macclesfield artists and invest in their practice – and it’ll be exciting to see their work premiere right here.”