A Modest Show: Stock Gallery Presents ‘Combine With Me’ at Cass Art Manchester

Jo Manby

A preview of the exhibition COMBINE With Me presented by STOCK Gallery, for which six Greater Manchester-based artists have been commissioned to make new work by pairing up and responding, adjusting or adapting each other’s creations. Catch the show at Cass Art from 19 August – 2 September 2022.

Kieran Healy of STOCK Gallery projects has paired up six contestants from across the borough of Greater Manchester and, with a nod to the popular TV programme, Come Dine With Me, has encouraged them to connect, work with and support each other under the theme of Utopia. The artists’ responses to the question, ‘what would, could, or should a post-pandemic world look like?’ are still being worked on at the time of writing – but the final pieces will go on show at Cass Art in central Manchester from 18 August as ‘COMBINE With Me’.

STOCK Gallery is an artist-led project run by Healy and his friend and gallery partner Alex Leigh, who is also one of the participating artists in the show. Healy is curating, producing and directing ‘COMBINE With Me’ as part of STOCK in partnership with Leigh, under the banner of A Modest Show. Like the TV programme, Healy explains, ‘it has that community aspect where strangers connect and share their taste and creations with one another. Which I think lends itself well to the format of the project. It also makes for a pretty naff pun, so I couldn’t help myself really.’

There are six participants, paired up as follows: Chris Alton and Alex Leigh, Amy Gough and Meg Woods, Freya Wysocki and Maria Jackson. I asked Healy about his selection process. ‘The main criteria I had for choosing artists in the first place was that they (a) had a multidisciplinary practice and (b) were broadly located around Greater Manchester. It was important that when paired up that they were from, or affiliated with, different areas or boroughs.’ This uniting principle celebrates a collectivist, socialist attitude that chimes with the remit of A Modest Show, whereby a budget for spending on shows and events that brought people together in the spirit of hospitality and sharing was a high priority.

‘So Alex Leigh is from Bolton, Meg Woods lives and works in Bolton but has strong affiliations with Salford. Freya Wysocki has a studio at P.S. Mirabel, but also has strong connections with Islington Mill in Salford and Underbank studios in Stockport. Amy Gough has just recently moved to Manchester and is based in Levenshulme, as well as Chris Alton whose practice is also based in Levenshulme. Maria Jackson is a recent graduate from Manchester School of art, and her practice is based in Withington.’

The selection was partly ‘on the basis of how the work was developing both process wise and conceptually.’ The multidisciplinary methods that each artist operates under increases the options for improvisation and responsive collaboration. When I asked Healy for shots of the works in progress, the artists were still in the kitchen stage of the project; sourcing, chopping, prepping, cooking. He sent me over tantalizing fragments of what will eventually be finalised pieces for exhibiting at Cass Art.

The first image I looked at was by Alex Leigh, a creator of magical realist assemblages, ‘free-form archaeology’ exploring the structures and ideologies that give form to the material world. Leigh passes on to Chris Alton a grey plinth topped with a flat painting of a shop front on the upper surface bearing the legend ‘Olympus’. With the theme of Utopia in mind, a flood of questions arise. Was this where photo-perfect Greek holidays were once processed behind the scenes? The shopfront has a corrugated roller shutter, blank windows and a brick façade. Harbouring pictures of the home of the gods of Greek myth? A four-tiered flower-decked UNESCO Biosphere Reserve where Orpheus once taught Bacchic ceremonies to fellow mystics? An abandoned camera shop? Or a takeaway out of hours?

The question is what Chris Alton will do with it, invited to add to or adapt the work in some way. Alton himself is an artist and curator working with socially engaged projects, video essays, textile banners and publications who in 2012 founded English Disco Lovers (EDL), an anti-fascist, pro-disco group and whose projects each inquire into a range of social, political, economic and environmental concerns.

Multidisciplinary illustrator and 3D artist, Amy Gough is paired with neurodiverse, queer artist Meg Woods. Woods’ cross disciplinary practice involves poetry, printmaking, textiles and illustration, and she often works autobiographically and with reference to mental health. Healy describes how this partnership developed because ‘they were both working on ideas surrounding self actualisation, but in completely different ways. Meg was looking at it through ideas of Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs, and Amy by creating a brochure for this rather dystopian “hyper personalised cruise”.’

Amy Gough’s offering is a glossy advertising-style zine which features a grimacing feminine athletic figure in blue lycra, poised as if for a high dive and flanked by two ghostly sky-blue dolphins. Underneath the sportswear brand-style ‘U-TOPIA’, like a logo for a new country, is an unreadable digital image that looks as if an algorithm has had a go at designing a new sea creature and come up with something part-cowrie, part-turtle and part-sea slug.

With an often humorous take on the anxieties and paranoias involved in negotiating contemporary times, Woods has created many disarmingly innocent looking ceramics and fabric-based works where neon paint, glitter and poetry call on darker undercurrents. Wood’s interpretation of Maslow’s model as a stack of deliciously-coloured satin pillows achieves an artistic synthesis of both the arena of psychoanalysis and the allure of pure sensory indulgence. Gough’s work, meanwhile, often features fabulous digital realms where slipshod mutating creatures morph in and out of asymmetry, inhabiting off-kilter maps and domains.

I asked Healy how much directing the project needed, and how much the artists had been left to improvise among themselves. ‘It has needed some direction, but… for the most part, artists have been left to their own devices. I had fairly regular check-ins and studio visits with artists just to get a sense of how the work was developing before and after pairing.’ Healy ensured the artists ‘swapped over the work at roughly the same time,’ but could then let the project run.

Looking at the work in progress images, Maria Jackson has created free-embroidery stitch work, the plain undyed background cross-hatched with repeated stitching in black thread, out of which supernatural flower or lamp forms loom. Jackson’s work references fragility and memory, mining the potentiality of active verbs like ‘weaving, stacking, holding, catching, falling and crumbling’ as metaphors for states of mind and mental processes, which can then in turn be articulated through an array of personal symbols or motifs that capture fragments of narrative around these themes.

Jackson has been paired with Freya Wysocki of Islington Mill-based TV Babies for ‘COMBINE With Me’. As with the other second round artists, it’s exciting to imagine how Wysocki will develop Jackson’s work into a final piece. Wysocki recently made a handstitched banner work, Clench (2022), for On The Rag’s exhibition ‘Breaking Bread’ in Chorlton, Manchester, also part of A Modest Show, and the green jelly creature Galaretka, a resin version of a Polish Easter delicacy traditionally made of meat, vegetables and aspic, in ‘Let Them Eat Fake’, the project by Bad Art Presents staged at The Bomb Factory in London in May.

As regards the concept for the project, ‘the body of this idea was originally something Alex and I wanted to do before we saw the brief for “A Modest Show”,’ Healy explains. ‘So, when we did see the call out, that's when I started getting ideas to make it “COMBINE With Me” and incorporate that “art as food” element. Normally ideas for a show would appear from concepts and narratives inherent in artworks I would choose for a particular exhibition,’ Healy says. ‘This one is a bit different in the sense that it is my first time working with pieces that are all new commissions, so it is working in a different way to what I am used to.’

As with the TV programme, where it’s never quite clear at the outset what will eventually be served up, what can visitors to the exhibition expect to see? ‘It is still a little bit hard to say at the minute as most of the artists are still responding to what each other has made. That said, what is coming through already is really exciting, there are a lot of lovely nuances appearing between the works. Lots of references to oceanic themes that also connect to more domestic settings, like fish n’ chip shops and things like that. So yeah, I think it should be a really good show, with plenty of different perspectives and textures that people can relate to. I'm looking forward to seeing how it all comes together.’