The Shadow of the Waxwing Slain
A6 Dialogue Exhibition 1
PS Mirabel Gallery,
Manchester UK 2014
The A6 through Manchester is one of Britain’s most historically significant arterial routes. Running through the city centre, it historically connected London with the industrial north, facilitating the movement of raw materials and manufactured textiles through what is often regarded as the world’s first industrialised city. Today, the route remains central to Manchester’s urban infrastructure and regeneration, while also connecting many of the city’s studios, galleries, and cultural spaces, linking its industrial history with its contemporary artistic landscape.
A6 Dialogue Exhibition 1
PS Mirabel Gallery,
Manchester UK 2014
The A6 through Manchester is one of Britain’s most historically significant arterial routes. Running through the city centre, it historically connected London with the industrial north, facilitating the movement of raw materials and manufactured textiles through what is often regarded as the world’s first industrialised city. Today, the route remains central to Manchester’s urban infrastructure and regeneration, while also connecting many of the city’s studios, galleries, and cultural spaces, linking its industrial history with its contemporary artistic landscape.
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The A6 Dialogue Exhibitions were organised through a network of Manchester artist studios and galleries geographically connected by the A6 route. However, for me, the designation “A6” did not solely evoke the road itself. Owing to my longstanding interest in the A-series paper system, my thoughts immediately shifted towards that parallel framework of reference. If A4 suggests the ubiquitous sheet of paper, then A6 evokes the pocket diary: a compact and highly personal object associated with the recording and structuring of time. This association was further reinforced by a passage in Pale Fire, from which the work also derives its title, in which an unused diary is described as being preserved “until its calendric correspondencies came around again.” The idea of deferred utility and cyclical temporal alignment became central to the conceptual framework of the work. Yet, isolated from context, a diary remains merely a functional object. The critical element therefore became the mode of presentation of the diary in direct relation to the title of the piece, allowing the literary reference, the material object, and the conceptual framework to operate together as a unified system of meaning. |
If the A6 road functions as a structure for geographic movement and connection, the A6 diary proposes a parallel system through which time itself is measured, ordered, and navigated. Positioned in relation to the title, the diary shifts from functional object to conceptual device through which ideas of time, repetition, and deferred purpose might be contemplated.