Introducing the 01625 Gallery – Macclesfield’s newest (and second smallest) art venue. I was delighted to be asked by Lucie Fitzpatrick, brains behind The Dolls House Art Gallery, to be the first artist to exhibit at her new venture which re-purposes the classic telephone boxes outside Macclesfield Town Hall. The theme was landscape and I wanted to do something obviously associated with Macc. One of my favourite walks during lockdown was over the Hollins to Langley, from where you get a great view of the mast on Croker Hill. Initially I thought of doing several different landmarks but then decided to stick with Croker Hill but show it under different conditions – summer, winter, autumn and night time. The deadline was very tight so I used collage to build up colour and texture quickly on top of a base of acrylic paint. I then added further details using more paint, applied with sponges and found objects. The tight timescale ended up working in my favour because it stopped me from getting too fussy and precious with the detail. After glorious warm sunny weather in the early part of November, the day Lucie and I had to install the pictures was, inevitably, wet and windy. Readers of my vintage may recall that phone box doors are heavy and not amenable to being propped open. Good for telephone calls, bad for installing large flappy paintings. At times it felt like a particularly fiendish episode of Taskmaster. Particularly as the phone boxes are listed so can’t have anything screwed into or permanently attached to them. Suffice to say that my previous admiration for the properties of gaffer tape has now reached stratospheric levels. But they look good! We were very pleased with ourselves and you can check them out for yourselves. The what3words location is jumps.froze.phones. Serendipitous huh?
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