Current

Current is a single large-scale work, roughly 4.5 metres wide, that grew directly out of the Coast to Coast listening conversations. Over the summer I sat with more than twenty people from across the North and drew each of them from life. Rather than record what was said, I wanted to hold how it felt to be truly listened to. Each live portrait captures a person's real-time presence, the small shifts in a face that words tend to flatten. Their audio and transcripts were shown separately at the venue, so the artwork itself stays wordless on purpose.

The figures are drawn in graphite and charcoal, then set into a torn-paper landscape of blues and golds, with metal foil catching the light as you move past. The torn edges echo coastline, and the quiet idea that a place leaves its marks on the people who live in it. Seen together, the faces form one continuous current of the North, individual yet held in the same tide.

Alongside the artwork I ran a free family workshop, "Marks of Light", with twenty participants from the Hong Kong community in Manchester, introducing foil embossing (repoussé) as a hands-on way into the same gilded visual language.