Please join us for a special one-off showing of artist Maurice Carlin’s installation Temporary Custodians of Islington Mill 2018 – 2028. A set of 100 unique prints using Permaprint Premium archival inks on Olin archival paper.
The artist will give an introduction to the work at 18:30, followed by the handing over of the first of the 100 unique prints to their designated custodians.
Salford-based artist Maurice Carlin is the first ever Clore Visual Artist Fellow (2016–17). His work Temporary Custodians is an installation of 100 individual prints in which the artist uses CMYK inks and paper in a specialised form of relief printing influenced by ancient Chinese stone rubbing techniques, considered the first ever form of publishing. Carlin has used this technique alongside its 21st century equivalent, digital live-streaming, in order to print and publish a vast expanse of a derelict floor surface at Islington Mill in Salford.
Temporary Custodians is an experiment in a new form of art distribution and ownership. Everyone who buys a print enters a 10 year ‘custodianship’ from 2018 to 2028, a joint ownership with fellow buyers which gives them the opportunity to decide the future of the complete installation, while entering conversations about the nature of art ownership and the future of Islington Mill itself.
Islington Mill is a reclaimed Georgian textile mill built in 1823, which for the last decade and a half has operated as an independent arts and music venue, directed by Bill Campbell, along with Maurice and his brother Mark Carlin, co-creators of Sounds from The Other City Festival. The Mill is presently home to around 100 artists and 50 small creative businesses, and is a creative mainstay of Salford and the Chapel Street area in particular.
All of Carlin’s work to date has sought to consider artistic practice through questioning the existing structures that art sits within and looking at how artists come to make their work in the first place and how structures within art and the wider world impact on the work and on the artist’s life. The Islington Mill Art Academy, a peer-led alternative art school, was Carlin’s own route to art education, further enacting the ethos of Islington Mill as art practice intertwined with life.