This is our Newsletter of 20 MAY 2021. If you’d like to receive our semi-regular round-up into your inbox, sign up here.
Let’s all meet up in the Year 2000…
With generous assistance from National Lottery Heritage Fund we are threading the living history of Islington Mill, researching and bringing to life our long complex history, from Georgian times to the present day. Each quarter we expand on a particular theme or era, and this time we are focusing on Islington Mill at the start of the new millennium.
As the twenty-first century dawned, Bill Campbell had been at the Mill for around 3 years and the building was becoming known as a place of experimental creativity and other-worldly experiences. We’ve added new artefacts to our Heritage Timeline reflecting on this exciting era. Listen to audio clips from a new oral history interview with artist and Mill Co-Director Rachel Goodyear as she recalls her first encounters with the Mill in 2000, and the personal and creative ways it helped shape her life. Plus, we have an incredible 12-minute documentary from 2001 chronicling ‘SHO 1’, a multi-venue arts festival that emanated from the Mill and spilled up and down Chapel Street. Sound familiar…?
Our Heritage Timeline is a living document, an evolving piece of research. If you have memories, images, anecdotes, experiences or legends from any era of Islington Mill we would love to hear them. Email greg@islingtonmill.com
PLUS…
The delayed and long-anticipated FatOut and Partisan Collective collab with Lone Taxidermist is ON…! Marra! will take place at Unit 2 on Regent Trading Estate in an IRL socially-distanced awesome spectacle of live art, music, improv, DJs, visuals and more. This event will welcome back to live sight and sound with a Salford BANG. Tickets.
Mill artist and researcher Helen McGhie currently has an outdoor exhibition of her atmospheric photography situated amongst the trees of Dalby Forest in North Yorkshire. The work forms part of the SelfScapes project. Read more here.
Our sign-off film this week is something really special. ‘Ritual Movement’ is a piece of work by Mon Salai, a new digital collective formed at Islington Mill. The video originated from Mill founder Bill Campbell’s desire to document and explore the radical changes happening at the Mill as our long hoped-for refurbishment plans take place.
The Mill has a long history of supporting artist endeavour, initiated in 1997 by Bill as an artist looking for space to develop his own practice within a supportive and committed community. Islington Mill expanded to accommodate arts and artist from every spectrum of practice as a space of freedom and exploration.
The music in Ritual Movement is a contemporary example of this. Mon Salai is a Queer collective of artists from a range of media including drag, performance, music and fashion who began jamming together on the 4th floor of the Mill, in the exact first space that Bill ever occupied back in 1997.
Read the full artist description and incredible motivations behind this film at the YouTube description. Please watch, listen and enjoy….
