Billboard and advertising spaces across Manchester will be taken over by Manchester-born artist Eve Stainton for one weekend in July as part of Build Hollywood’s ’s first major curatorial and artist commission, ‘All About Love’.
Taking place across five UK cities between April – September 2023, the ‘All About Love’ project champions artists who are either born in those cities or live and work there, with the commissions taking inspiration from a quote from All About Love, the groundbreaking book, published in 2000, by cultural critic, feminist theorist and author, bell hooks. The project is curated by Zarina Rossheart.
The new commission for ‘All About Love’, will be presented in more than twenty locations in prominent sites across the city including Princess Street, Fairfield Street Piccadilly, Shudehill and Great Marlborough Street amongst others.
For their ‘All About Love’ commission, Eve Stainton is focussing on the well known saying ‘You can take the girl out of Manchester, but you can’t take Manchester out of the girl.’ Beginning with welding this sentence onto long flat steel bars, Eve has replaced the subject and the location in the phrase with an *insert here* line; ‘You can take the _____ out of _____, but you can’t take _____ out of the ______’.. These welded words have then been placed onto a psychedelic collaged landscape made up of images of Eve’s performance work, their body and neoprene pieces.
Interested in the phrase’s capacity for politically contradicting sentiments, the artist addresses questions of belonging, cultural identification, solidarity and empowerment, as well as themes of identity, class and gender – all issues that were prominently articulated by bell hooks in All About Love.
Here and there the word ‘Manchester’ will be spotted across the billboards, to playfully reference Eve’s love and connection to the city they grew up in and acknowledge the traces of its cultural aesthetics that still permeate their work today.
Artist Eve Stainton said:
“I’ve been interested in the saying ‘You can take the girl out of Manchester, but you can’t take Manchester out of the girl’. It’s a double-edged meaning depending on who is saying it to whom. I’ve heard this phrase many times in my family, when I’ve worn some kind of clashing style of tracksuit with a pair of smart leather shoes, or said ‘going shop’ instead of ‘going to the shop’… It’s a loving acknowledgement of solidarity and belonging: they’ve clocked something of a cultural aesthetic within the fabric of Manchester manifesting in the person. It can also be derogatory, usually related to class.
For me, bell hooks’ All About Love is embracing an unpacking of different notions of love and society’s teaching. For this commission, I’ve welded the sentence onto flat steel bars and removed the subject and the location; ‘You can take the _____ out of _____, but you can’t take _____ out of the ______’ to encourage a playful relationship with the viewer who can insert their own pronoun/city/idea, as well as a questioning of the phrase itself.”
Curator Zarina Rossheart said:
‘There is this powerful feeling of self-love and self-acceptance that takes over when a witness to Eve’s work. They gently and generously invite us into their world through interaction, performance practice, costumes, sound, their body, the welding process and so much more. To have the opportunity to see this new very personal series of collages encompassing so many of these elements, presented at such a large scale in their home city, is inspiring and a dream come true!’
