Rusholme Isolation

An enforced overnight lock-down return to Manchester from Central Saint Martins just weeks before my Degree Show that wasn’t left me adrift. My creative therapy was to repurpose a wide range of artists for the Covid Pandemic.

By re-purposing the work of artists or art schools as an occasional series of Instagram posts, I focused my creative response to the frustration and anger at the curtailment of my masters in the run-up to my never to be degree show and the mismanagement of the UK Government.

On St Patrick’s Day, 17th March, I left London to self-isolate in Manchester, abandoning my degree show installations in the Archway studios.

In a state of shock, I decided to re-ignite my creativity by publicly committing to a new Instagram (PhilBxyz) project. The rules were simple:

  • work must comment on the Covid-19 pandemic
  • it must be made with the (limited) materials available to me at home
  • it must re-purpose or re-invent the work of an established artist
  • it must take no longer than four hours to make

I posted the first on on 20th March and the 20th (I wanted to overtake Covid-19) on 18th May.

You can see the results with contemporaneous text from the Instagram texts in my Gallery.

Rusholme Isolation 7: Monday morning. This one brings me closer to home as the mood darkens. Outside the Mather & Platt factory in Newton Heath, “Going to Work” by LS Lowry commissioned war artist in 1943 and today, as for many, going to work simply involves turning on a computer. Politicians talk about the blitz spirit, but this time the ‘enemy’s is within… You can’t see the work at Imperial War Museum North, but will be able to again. In the 1980s I was involved in demolishing & decontaminating the abandoned engineering works in Newton Heath. Now Manchester City usually plays there.
Rusholme Isolation 12: JMW Turner’s 1812 ‘Snow Storm: Hannibal Crossing the Alps’ repurposed for 2020. Our elephant in the room is the ‘free’ market in travel, technology and exploiting Gaia, which inevitably led to a global re-connection with nature, of which we are a part. I offer you ‘Gathering Storm: Covid 19 Crosses the Planet’.
Rusholme Isolation 16: Alexander Rodchenko weighs into the autopsy on the Government’s woeful performance on testing. 100,000 tests a day anyone? Beautiful portrait of Lilya Blick and striking graphics shout it to the world. OK, he was selling books, but so much urgent shout out was crying out to be repurposed for these viral times
Rusholme Isolation 13: Nature will not be mocked! After fifty years of GDP growth at all costs and forty years of neo-liberalism, nature is fighting back. If we don’t change course, she will continue to do so. For Tracey Emin, its personal!
Rusholme Isolation 18: Edward Hopper makes social distancing a virtue until, outrageously, he’s Trumped. Ignorance is no defence and the US President no match for a clever germ. Mind you, nor is Bolsenaro or Johnson. Me is everything…