Parties

June 14 – July 27, 2025

Project Space

Rogue Artists’ Studios CIC

4 Barrass Street

Higher Openshaw

Manchester

M11 1PU

Parties

The Oxford Dictionary of English[1] defines the word ‘party’ as:

Party noun (pl. parties)

1. A social gathering of invited guests, typically involving eating, drinking, and entertainment: an engagement party.
2. A formally constituted political group that contests elections and attempts to form or take part in a government: draft the party’s election manifesto.
3. A group of people taking part in a particular activity or trip.
4. A person or people forming one side in an agreement or dispute: a contract between two parties.
5. Informal: a person, especially one with particular characteristics: an old party has been coming in to clean.

verb (parties, partying, partied) [no obj.] Informal: enjoy oneself at a party or other lively gathering, typically with drinking and music: put on your glad rags and party!

• PHRASES Be party (or a party) to be involved in: he was party to some very shady deals.
• ORIGIN Middle English (denoting a body of people united in opposition to others, also in sense 2): from Old French partie, based on Latin partiri ‘divided into parts’. Sense 1 dates from the early 18^th cent.

When is a work break a party?

According to the aphorism, ‘a picture paints a thousand words’[2]. However, one word with contemporary resonance has multiple meanings and suggests unlimited visual manifestations. At a time when words and their usage are more fiercely debated than ever, this project explores some of the visual dimensions of one of the most compendious and controversial terms of all. From family celebrations to political associations, Parties evokes a range of activities that may have purely recreational, or alternatively, world changing significance.

Parties brings the domestic shindig, Christmas, wedding, birthday, fancy dress and work bashes, together with party political visual culture to explore the extraordinary range of images that language can evoke. Combining paintings based on amateur photographic source material with home movies, political posters, artefacts and objects drawn from the artist’s own collection of vintage propaganda material, Parties takes a historical perspective on the power of the word to shape our lives.

---

August 1939 Bank Holiday Party Ashdown Forest oil on canvas 122 x 197 cm 2024

Marz 1961 (1) oil on canvas 122 x 174 cm 2022

Marz 1961 (2) oil on canvas 2022

Otto’s Party oil on canvas 173 x 260 cm 2024

---

[1] Soanes, C and Stevenson, A. (2005) Oxford Dictionary of English (2^nd Ed) London: Oxford University Press.

[2] Attributed to Frederick R. Barnard. First appeared in Printer’s Ink in December 1921.