Book printing

Raw Material, a book combining our own body of photographic work with documentation of the PSI programme and a section on Regeneration officers, their work and those affected by it, has being designed by Music in Manchester. Special thanks to Anthony who's put so much care and attention to the design of the book and to Matt (Music's production maestro) - they've been a pleasure to work with.

Publish PostHighlight printers in Warrington check proofs for colour variations across the separate paper stocks.

We've been working on the book solidly for the past few weeks, deciding on the edit, text and how to integrate such separate bodies of work into one cohesive whole. Coming across a William Morris speech given in Burslem over 120 years ago has resulted in a seamless link from artists to regeneration. In Art and the Beauty of the Earth, Morris states:

Of all the things that is likely to give us back popular art in England, the cleaning of England is the first and most necessary. Those who are to make beautiful things must live in a beautiful place. Some people may be inclined to say, and I have heard the argument put forward, that the very opposition between the serenity and purity of art and the turmoil and squalor of a great modern city stimulates the invention of artists, and produces special life in the art of today. I cannot believe it. It seems to me that at best it but stimulates the feverish and dreamy qualities that throw some artists out of the general sympathy. But apart from that, these are men who are stuffed with memories of more romantic days and pleasanter lands, and it is on these memories they live, to my mind not altogether happily for their art [.]

I abide by my statement that those who are to make beautiful things must live in beautiful places, but you must understand I do not mean to claim for all craftsmen a share of those gardens of the world, or of those sublime and awe-inspiring mountains and wastes that men make pilgrimages to see[.]

For surely there is no square mile of earth's inhabitable surface that is not beautiful in its own way, if we men will only abstain from wilfully destroying that beauty; and it is this reasonable share in the beauty of the earth that I claim as the right of every man who will earn it by due labour; a decent house with decent surroundings for every honest and industrious family; that is the claim which I make of you in the name of art.

William Morris

13 October 1881 before the Wedgewood Institute at the Town Hall, Burslem