An open Open

Can’t quite believe it’s the preview weekend of an exhibition that includes work by me… the Manchester Open 2022 at HOME is now officially an open Open, and I shall be visiting tomorrow – and I’m pretty excited about it! I made a visual / concrete poem, a kind of calligram (after Guillaume Apollinaire, forefather of Surrealism and coiner of the term Cubism) that can be viewed as well as read. It's called ‘Saturnine Night’, and is an approximation of the shape of Saturn, my starsign’s ruling planet, if you’re down with that kind of thing. If you’re not down with that kind of thing, you won’t know that we’ve just like two days ago taken leave of Capricorn’s chunk of the year (as an aside, when I worked on ELLE, my lovely boss let me change the dates in the horoscopes as they weren’t quite aligned properly and made me a Sagittarius, so, y’know, life goals and all that). Anyway, if you’re not down with that kind of thing, the artwork has nothing to do with that kind of thing and lots to do with other kinds of things, including Saturday nights (one of the reasons why I’ve booked my preview slot for 7pm on a Saturday), which you’ll find out if you hop along from Monday and have a look. The pictures are of my artwork all wrapped up when I dropped it off on 11 December, plus a snippet of Saturnine Night along with a bit of Saturn, from the Twitter account Bits of Saturn (which is real trippy if you scroll through lots, like I just did) taken by NASA’s Cassini spacecraft, which man… Anyway, even if you don’t want to have a look at my planetary exploration, it’s one of 400 artworks (chosen from a staggering 2,271 entries!), so there’s plenty more to feast your eyes upon. The exhibition is free and runs from Monday 24 January until Sunday 27 March, and during the first five weeks you can put forward your three favourite pieces for The People’s Choice Award. Book your timeslot here, and enjoy...