Best of 2019

2019 has been characterised by a precarious balance of full-time work, freelance work, conferences and attempts at academic writing. My primary output has been through the Fourdrinier, a new art writing site focused on work on paper, for which I have interviewed and written about artists including Jade Montserrat, Jenny Steele and Hondartza Fraga.

On Monday 15 April (it was made particularly memorable by the fact that later that day, in Paris, Notre Dame was to burn down), I was cycling to work in perfect conditions – sunny, windless and traffic-free due to the Easter holidays. Speeding along a straight section of the A6 on the borders of Lonsight and Ardwick, I realised my feet were racing around the pedals and I was going far too fast for the gear I was in. I tried to change gear, misbalanced, fell off and hit the road hard on my shoulder, breaking my collarbone. This put a stop to cycling for an interminable three months and, whilst I’ve now made a full recovery (unfortunately the recovery of Notre Dame looks far less certain), it sent me a message to try to slow down and take life at a bit less of a frantic pace. In spite of this, this is what I did manage to see/enjoy in 2019:

Travel

I spent two weeks in India this winter, which was an immersive sensory experience: there were so many sights, smells, sounds and colours to take in everywhere. I loved how colourful it was, particularly the clothing. In the UK I am used to standing out a lot with my colourful clothing. In India, it was the norm for people to wear bright yellows and greens and hot pinks.

One of the really big surprises was how green the cities were – there was such a variety of flowers and trees. In New Delhi, even the roundabouts were landscaped, and everywhere you looked were carefully tended pot plants. There was great variety in birds and animals: I was really excited by seeing ibises and eagles and bats, and colourful butterflies.

I really liked the street culture, and how alive the cities felt – the streets were used by people selling food, chai and clothes and offering services such as shoe shining and barbering. They felt like public spaces – families gathered in the parks and gardens, even after dark, picnicking or playing cricket. Everyone was really curious about visitors – people wanted to have selfies taken, to talk to you and find out where you were from and what you thought of India, and to shake your hand.

It was a vegetarian’s paradise: I loved eating idli, paratha, channa, uttapam, poha and bonda for breakfast every day, and trying regional dishes and variations on dosas and thalis and pani puri.

I enjoyed cosmopolitan New Delhi, especially the extraordinary eighteenth century Jantar Mantar observatory, and Mumbai, with its high concentration of luxurious art deco blocks, built on land reclaimed from the Arabian sea. However, visiting Chandigarh, the new capital city planned and designed for the Punjab post-partition by Le Corbusier (reached by a spacious train, with a lavish at-seat breakfast service consisting of multiple food courses and rounds of tea), was undoubtedly the highlight.

I loved exploring road inspector's Nek Chand's fantastical, magical rock garden – busy with families, selfie-taking couples and smartly-dressed, excitable parties of schoolchildren – and the grid-planned city's housing districts for government workers (enviable cycling infrastructure was designed into the city, and the bicycle appeared to be the dominant mode of transport, unlike car-choked Delhi), designed by Le Corbusier's cousin Pierre Jeanneret and the British couple Maxwell Fry and Jane Drew, just as much as Le Corbusier's grandiose, awe-inspiring Capitol complex.

Whilst Gujarati city Ahmedabad is a World Heritage Site due to its high concentration of historic mosques, most of the city appeared to be a construction site: everywhere buildings were being knocked down and replaced with hotels and high-rise apartment blocks, leaving clouds of building dust. In spite of this, Le Corbusier's Millowners' Association was a real highlight of India. Formerly a centre of calico production, known as the 'Manchester of East', the Millowners' Association once overlooked the river to a view of hundreds of factory chimneys. Built as a networking space, and to show off new innovations in manufacturing, with its dramatic interplays of light and shadow, and fluidity between inside and outside spaces, this felt the closest I have ever felt to being inside a sculpture. Two houses built by Le Corbusier for mill-owning families felt like green oases as the city expanded around them.

In the summer I spoke at a conference in Porto, a sprawling city split across a river like Manchester-Salford or Newcastle-Gateshead. Full of old, hilly, cobbled streets to get lost in, a surprising amount of dereliction and facades with nothing behind, as well as the famous tiles which act like a ‘raincoat’ for the city, it was also strikingly rich in art deco buildings and details, from housing and cinemas to garages. The Worst Tours, a three-hour tour delivered by an architect turned tourguide (who had been forced into tourism by the financial crash and ongoing austerity), was a great introduction. Our guide spoke about the way in which Porto has developed over time and the politics of space and regeneration. A highlight was the architecture of Álvaro Siza, including the co-operative SAAL Bouça Housing designed after the Portuguese revolution.

Closer to home, Doncaster was bustling and lively but had a tough edge.

Loughborough was a pleasant industrial market town dominated by a huge post-war university campus (since expanded) – and a 1923 carillon on the skyline, which also serves as a war memorial. A collection of campus artworks contrasted with the sportiness of the students, and the high concentration of sports pitches.

Uppermill, on the edges of Oldham, with its swishly done-up Weavers Factory, had a spectacular landscape and views over Greater Manchester, but felt otherwise claustrophobically twee and bourgeois.

Walks

Waterlogged fields made for a muddy walk from Marple Bridge, on the outskirts of Stockport, to Mellor, on the edge of the Peak District. Tall terraces backed onto a loudly rushing river at pretty hamlet Mill Brow, and the ancient hill-top church of St Thomas, next to the site of an archaeological dig and a reconstructed roundhouse, contrasted with the views over the tower blocks of Stockport and Manchester’s modern-day glass high-rises.

At Upnor in Kent, the River Medway left a muddy beach of oyster shells, pottery, bricks and glass, with chalet communities on the banks. An estuarine fort and rows of houseboats made for a picturesque walk towards Sheerness bridge in the distance.

Swims

Sandford Park Lido, a long pool surrounded by lawns in the extremely posh Cotswolds town of Cheltenham, was heaving on one of the hottest days of the year. The pool has consistently well-used since the 1930s and attracts hundreds of thousands of visitors every year. It’s adapted well to the times, though, serving vegan burgers and ice cream.

Cirencester’s Victorian Open Air Swimming Pool, by contrast, was far less busy and more relaxed. Run by volunteers, and featuring a book and swimwear swap, it had a community feel and was heated to the perfect temperature. Down a lane alongside a half-dried up river, and overlooked by a castle surrounded by medieval streets, this has got to be one of the most scenic settings for a swim in Britain.

I was extremely disappointed to find Álvaro Siza’s Tidal pools of Leça da Palmeira, on the coast outside Porto, shut for refurbishment, as big waves crashed over the rocks of Porto’s cold, windy, misty beaches. Luckily, another sixties pool by Siza, the tranquil Piscina da Quinta da Conceição, provided a more sheltered spot, set in parkland with grassed sun terraces and polished wood changing rooms.

Art

Penny Woolcock’s film-based exhibition ‘Fantastic Cities’ at Modern Art Oxford brought together a plurality of viewpoints exploring how our experiences of cities and how we behave in them are affected by identities such as gender, class and race.

Larry Achiampong and David Blandy’s ‘Genetic Automata’ at Arts Catalyst in London was an engaging film installation challenging our ideas of race, heritage and identity through a collage of popular cultural imagery (from videogames and emojis to Darwin’s taxidermy collection), with an alternative music soundtrack.

‘But what if we tried?’ at Touchstones in Rochdale was an illuminating experiment to display as much of the town’s 1,500-strong art collection at once as possible (there’s only space to show about 300 pieces), exploring the curatorial and logistical processes behind the scenes of programming a gallery, the legacies and ongoing acquisitions which shape collections, politics of funding and ownership, and the challenges and responsibilities of conservation and care.

‘Still I Rise (Act 2)’ at the De La Warr Pavilion in Bexhill was an immersive and all-encompassing survey of feminism and culture which ranged across activism, representation, sexuality, urbanism, spirituality, new models for living, working and organising and much, much more.

The Festival of Making and ‘Art in Manufacturing’ programme brought together art, science and industry in Blackburn. Dan Edwards' series of street signs ‘We Can Do More’, displayed around the town, were reminders and prompts to act, subverting a workers’ instruction manual and street signage. Amy Pennington’s ‘Return to Sender’ project, working with an envelope factory, asked local people to send responses to questions about their working practices, and Daksha Patel’s ‘Connecting Yarn’, looked at the UK and worldwide destinations of yarn dyed in Blackburn. The highlight, though, was Liz Wilson’s repetitive, hypnotic video and sound installation ‘The Optical Mechanical’, which gradually built up an ensemble of found sounds and images resembling minimalist classical music.

Nika Neelova’s ‘EVER’ took place across the former brewery offices of the Tetley in Leeds, reimagining the building’s gallery spaces through a series of sculptural interventions exploring and subverting the materiality of its interiors.

Laurie Anderson’s virtual reality experience ‘To the Moon’, at the Royal Exchange in Manchester was a rare opportunity to fly and explore space in the body of an astronaut. Her dreamy yet subtly political installation suggested that stars are the one thing man can’t harvest or destroy.

Frances Disley’s participatory solo show ‘The Cucumber Fell in the Sand’ at Humber Street Gallery in Hull asked us to slow down and focus on our experience, whilst thinking about approaches to care and growing, and how we look after ourselves and others.

'Instituting Care', Jade Montserrat’s huge wall drawings and installation/reading room/library at the Bluecoat in Liverpool (which then toured to Humber Street) explored ideas of education and care, both through institutions and alternative models and ways of thinking.

There was lots to look at and think about in ‘Future Cities’ at the Centre for Chinese Contemporary Art in Manchester, but the highlight was Laurence Lek’s time- and city-travelling video work Pyramid Schemes, which explored architecture as sign, symbol, fantasy and spectacle, and its cultural and physical meanings and impact.

I was excited to visit Radar at Loughborough University, whose research-led visual arts programme I have long admired. 'This Was Just What I Saw' was the result of a collaboration between Human Geography lecturer Dr Sarah Mills and artist Katarina Hruskova, inspired by the art teaching methods of Marion Richardson, an interwar educationalist associated with child art, who worked to develop children’s powers of self-expression and ‘inner eye’ using the power of memory, description and observation. Mills and Hruskova worked with Richardson’s archive, and children in present-day Midlands schools, to reanimate and reimagine Richardson’s methods.

The British Ceramics Biennial in Stoke-on-Trent explored the legacy and heritage of clay in the area, and its international connections, pushing the boundaries of what ceramics are and the form they take, raising issues round authenticity, copies and their relation to the original. Highlights included Terms & Conditions at Airspace and Victoria Lindo and William Brookes’ pots at Spode Works, where a tragic story lurked beneath the beauty of ornately worked surfaces.

Elizabeth Price’s ‘A Long Memory’ at the Whitworth in Manchester was full of bizarre and bewildering juxtapositions and references to memory, culture, language, technology and change: in her films, it’s not always clear what’s real and what’s fiction. The highlight was At the House of Mr X, an increasingly surreal tour around a modernist house which offered an alternative perspective on value, lingering on seemingly banal details about the materials of the house, its decor and contents.

‘Banner Culture’ at Brierfield Mill, part of the British Textiles Biennial, brought together the most banners I’ve ever seen in one place: the variety of media and techniques used, and political causes and makers, from professionals to collaborative and community-based projects, was astonishing.

Amalia Pica’s solo show ‘Private & Confidential’ at the New Art Gallery in Walsall subverted bureaucratic motifs of officialdom and attempted to find joy in the paper trails of institutional correspondence she had to navigate when going through the process of obtaining British citizenship.

I found Katie Paterson’s transmissions across time, space and distance, and explorations of our planet and others, at Turner Contemporary in Margate, whimsical but quite engrossing.

Also at the Turner Contemporary, Lawrence Abu Hamdan's films were the highlight of this year's (extremely serious) Turner Prize. The standout was After SFX, an alternative dictionary of sounds with connotations of torture, compiled through interviews with former inmates of Syria's Sednyaya Prison, which showed how our sensory perceptions rely on our prior knowledge and experiences to explain and make sense of the indescribable.

Film

‘The Favourite’ had absolutely fantastic performances from all three leads and made you wonder who was manipulating whom.

It was a great year for British film: Carol Morley’s ‘Out of Blue’ was a modern-day noir and detective story set in New Orleans. Featuring an astonishing performance from Patricia Clarkson, and playing with masks and appearances, you didn’t know what to believe and it made you question the extent to which you can ever really know someone.

Both humorous and sad, ‘Bait’ looked and sounded beautiful. Though sometimes straying close to parody and stereotype, the tension rose perfectly in this tale of conflict between locals of a Cornish fishing village and second home-owners.

‘Ray and Liz’ was a social realist drama with a surrealist, dreamy twinge, like Terence Davies meets Andrea Arnold. Flitting backwards and forwards in time between a terrace and tower block, it was a portrait of Richard Billingham’s childhood – and of neglect – as much as of his parents.

‘The Souvenir’, Joanna Hogg’s Jarmonesque story about the lives of Sloaney upper classes was her best film yet, and one whose characters – including fantastic mother-daughter performers by Tilda Swinton and Honor Byrne Swinton – and their stories stayed in your mind long afterwards.

Elsewhere, Claire Denis’ first English-language film, the melancholy ‘High Life’, featured a confusingly twisted and often disturbing sci-fi plot and a characteristically atmospheric score by Stuart A Staples.

‘Capernaum’ was a tender, heartbreaking Lebanese film exploring ideas of family, care, nurture, choice and responsibility, and based on the premise of a boy (who was old before his time) suing his family for being born and for child neglect.

‘The Chambermaid’ explored frustrated ambition, claustrophobia, class, exploitation and stoicism, all within the confines of a luxury hotel in Mexico City.

‘Book Smart’ was improbable but hilarious. ‘Woman At War’ was a subtly funny, surreal Icelandic comedy in which the landscape and the weather was ultimately the star.

‘Pain and Glory’ was muted by Almodóvar's standards, and surprisingly moving, telling a story of creative inspiration, ageing and loss.

‘If Beale Street Could Talk’ was beautifully shot with a lush score and contemplative voiceover. Combining the personal with the institutional, a love story was intertwined with the sound and colour of a sultry New York summer.

I enjoyed 'Once Upon A Time in Hollywood' and 'The Irishman' for their soundtracks and period styling as much as for their plots (and Brad Pitt and Leonardo di Caprio's on screen chemistry in 'Once Upon A Time in Hollywood').

‘Bridges of Time’ brought together new and historic documentary film showing everyday life in the Baltic states behind the Iron Curtain, from children dancing, singing and at school, to seal-hunting, fishing and forestry, to the uniformity of Soviet apartment blocks, surveyed from above. Dating from the 1960s, 1980s and 1990s, elderly film-makers and their subjects were brought together with extremely moving results.

‘Island of Hungry Ghosts’ had a strong sense of place, exploring the migration of crabs and humans on Australia's Christmas Island.

‘Being Frank’, the Frank Sidebottom documentary, was both hilarious and tragic. It told a very personal story – encompassing the dual personas of Frank Sidebottom and Chris Sievey – and presented a picture of thwarted ambition and unbridled creativity across music, comedy, art and even computer programming.

‘Rudeboy: The Story of Trojan Records’ was not just the story of Trojan records but an exploration of migration, identity, cultures, relationships and social change.

‘Stories from the She Punks’ discussed how and why women got into bands and learned to play, arguing that it gave often shy young women a voice, something to say and the means to say it.

TV

‘Black Mirror’ continued its preoccupation with technology. The British-set episodes were the highlights: Striking Vipers, which explored the implications of pornography and the boundaries between the real and the virtual worlds and Smithereens, with its screen-mediated lives, couldn't have been more topical.

Jeremy’s Deller’s documentary ‘Everybody in the Place’ provided a social, material, political, cultural and musical history of rave culture – and the 1980s. Presented in the form of a sixth form history lesson, it mercifully avoided the usual staid talking heads.

Michael Apted’s ‘Up’ series made a welcome return to the TV. Now aged 63, the participants’ relationship with Apted had become as central as the initial themes of class and work. The programme was given an added poignancy through the participants’ experiences of ageing and loss, and a topicality through attitudes to Brexit.

Theatre

‘Tao of Glass’ was an incredibly funny and moving one-man monologue from Phelim McDermott offering a deeply personal reflection on art, creativity and inspiration. McDermott took us on a journey from his teenage years in Blackley, north Manchester, listening to Philip Glass records and dreaming of being on stage at the Royal Exchange to moving to New York and producing Philip Glass operas. Visually and musically gorgeous, combining paper, music and puppetry, 'Tao of Glass' felt genuinely international and collaborative. When Philip Glass himself appeared on stage at the end, hugging McDermott and holding hands, I wasn’t the only audience member moved to tears.

Books

‘From Rzycki, Michael Galeta, a 20th century life’ was an extremely moving tribute by Robert Galeta to his late father. It pieced together and tried to make sense of his life, firstly as a teenager taken from his family and village in Poland (now in the Ukraine) to a forced labour camp in Germany during the war, and passing through a series of camps in France and Italy, before settling and making a life in Bradford – from where Galeta and his father took journeys together and re-eencountered traces of the people and places his father had formerly known.

‘Present Tense’, published by Liverpool culture site the Double Negative, reflected on the legacy of the city as Capita of Culture, a decade on. One of the highlights was a Liverpool sculpture walk by Denise Courcoux, which made me want to go and hunt some of the sculptures down.

Finally, although Essex and its architecture and culture has been a place of renewed interest in recent years, thanks in large part to the efforts of Focal Point Gallery's Radical Essex programme, Gillian Darley's return to her home county for 'Excellent Essex' shed some light on some of the county's still lesser-known histories and figures.

Music

The most beautiful record of the year was Jessica Pratt’s aptly named 'Quiet Signs'. At times Tropicalia-esque, her guitar and voice were augmented by piano and flute, bringing to mind Hope Sandoval, 'Pink Moon'-era Nick Drake and even Erik Satie.

Mark Stewart’s distinctive voice rang out like a timely warning call on Jah Wobble’s A Very British Coup, also featuring Andrew Weatherall, Keith Levene and Richard Dudanski.

Kate Tempest’s Firesmoke was downbeat and vulnerable, but personal and ultimately affirmative electronica.

My discovery of the year was the Afrobeat/gospel/jazz of 'Where the Future Holds' by Chicago’s Black Monument Ensemble, the highlight being the catchy and urgent Sounds like Now.

David Berman made a welcome return with Purple Mountains’ droll country, particularly on the contradictorily upbeat All My Happiness Has Gone, before his untimely death.

Another welcome return was No Rock: Save in Roll, a new single in Cornershop’s classic style.

Elsewhere, Trash Kit went all jammy on Horizon, Pozi’s Engaged was nursery rhyme-esque grunge with a raw, simple violin line and Dogs by All Girls Arson Club had the ramshackle charm of Tallulah Gosh and alt-folk, and I can't get Liz Naylor (named after the iconic City Fun writer and friend of the band) by Barry out of my head.

Gigs

It was too busy to actually see Jessica Pratt during her gig at Manchester’s hippest new venue, Yes, but the minimal set up of her band – just her, a guitar and a Korg keyboardist, with an encore performed solo – allowed her voice and otherworldly melodies to shine through. The audience was rapt, appreciative and appeared to be intimately acquainted with her work.

Sauna Youth and Trash Kit played short but sweet 35-mintue sets at the White Hotel in Salford. At Yes, Trask Kit side project Sacred Paws expanded with a bassist and second guitarist, but it was best when it was just the two of them playing fast punk.

At the Bridgewater Hall, Mark Elder explained and contextualised the Hallé Orchestra’s performance of Shostakovich’s Leningrad Symphony with a knowledge and enthusiasm that made you want to learn more.

The richness and dour beauty of Bill Callahan’s songs shone through at the Albert Hall in Manchester, during a stripped down set featuring a bowed and plucked double bass, bowed and plucked.

Jazz trio GoGo Penguin performed a live, post-rock-style soundtrack to 'Koyaanisqatsi' at the Royal Northern College of Music, keeping pace with the intensity of the film and its frenetic visuals.

The most fun gig of the year was the Broadcast-esque weird-pop of Stealing Sheep at Yes. Their psychedelic a capella, three-piece vocal harmonies and co-ordinated dance moves culminated in an inflatable sheep in the crowd. Wearing matching body-tight, glittery dresses, and sparkling faces and hair, they appeared to be delighted to be there. Dancier and more bassy live, they even incorporated a cover of Last Night A DJ Saved My Life.

Finally, it was good to back on stage, performing with experimental poetry project Chelsea from Essex at Band on the Wall's free jazz showcase.

Best of 2016

Art

Two of my art highlights of the year came early in 2016. After years of planning to visit, I was finally enticed over to Nottingham Contemporary for Monuments Should Not Be Trusted, a wide-ranging exhibition of art and artefacts from Tito’s Yugoslavia. From dark, Joy Division-esque music videos to punk to dreamy electronica, the exhibition encompassed consumerism, critique, feminism and subcultures. Among the most absurd and surprising were the eccentrically decorated youth batons, as well as the array of bizarre gifts presented to Tito, custom-made to reflect the work of different professions and groups of society. Other highlights included the films of Karpo Godina, particularly the playfully soundtracked Healthy People for Fun.

Another early highlight was a display of large-scale, colourful post-war textiles by Tibor Reich, a Hungarian artist who settled in Britain, at the Whitworth Art Gallery. I went expecting to see textiles, but the exhibition was far more than that: Reich designed his own family home, and incorporated lots of architectural drawings into his fabric patterns. I also loved some of his functional ceramics, such as ashtrays, jugs and salt and pepper shakers, given character and humour by the incorporation of quirky caricatures.

The most compelling exhibition of the year – and the highlight of Home’s programming thus far – was Rachel Maclean’s Wot u :-) About. The central film brings to mind mindfulness and meditation gurus, depicting selfies and desperate grasping for public approval. It’s grotesque and uncomfortable viewing but also topical, contemporary and very much of the now. Elsewhere in the exhibition, the grotesque world she creates steps out from her film in the form of sculpture and installation.

Another unexpected highlight was Vogue 100 at Manchester Art Gallery, which celebrated 100 years of British Vogue by showing cover designs, drawings and illustrations from the Vogue archive, from the magazine’s early years to the classic work of photographers like Cecil Beaton to the present day. Vogue 100 vastly surpassed my expectations: it didn’t just document changing fashions and ideas of beauty but cultural, political, literary, artistic and social change. The exhibition showed portraits of the personalities of the day, from Snowdon’s royals to Thatcher to an impossibly young-looking Posh and Becks to Kate Middleton, as well as the assimilation of movements such as punk into fashion. Highlights included William Klein’s fantastical set designs at Jodrell Bank; Norman Parkinson’s portrait of Jerry Hall astride a giant statue in Armenia in 1976; Lee Miller’s land girls in their Harrods ‘austerity trousers’ (eight vouchers each) and documentation of war damage; Alexander McQueen with a smoking skull, going behind the scenes to offer a portrait of the makers of the fashion; the film-maker John Schlesinger in the studio of David Hockney; Frank Horvat’s aristocratic-looking woman in a tailored wool dress and jacket standing surrounded by children in an alleyway in the wool city of Bradford; and the grunge aesthetic of Stella Tennant’s eyeliner, nose ring and messy crop.

At Liverpool Biennial, the highlight was HFT The Gardener, Suzanne Treister’s beautiful, intricate, colourful quasi-botanical series of drawings at Liverpool John Moores University. Constructing a narrative world involving an amateur botanist/outsider artist, Treister transformed our perceptions of FTSE 100 companies by introducing psychedelic possibilities. The other highlight of Liverpool Biennial was Mark Leckey's video work Dream English Kid at Camp and Furnace, intertwining personal, natural and cultural biography and memory. Also worth seeing were Krzysztof Wodiczko's street installations and interventions at FACT, and Fabien Giraud and Raphaël Siboni's sunset in extreme slow-motion at Open Eye.

At Henry Moore Institute in Leeds I enjoyed A Lesson In Sculpture With John Latham, a show exploring ideas around work, monuments, value and social and natural environments, which displayed Latham’s ‘skoob’ sculptures alongside work by Mary Kelly and strange environmental constructions by Yves Klein bringing to mind the experimental living environments of Buckminster Fuller.

The Stanley and Audrey Burton Gallery at Leeds University gave an interesting insight into Mitzi Cunliffe, the American-born designer of the Bafta mask and creator of many public artworks in Manchester and the North of England. Cunliffe came across as a stylish and glamorous figure, designing her own dress and accessories for the unveiling of the Man-made Fibres sculpture at Leeds University. Another highlight was seeing the door handles and knockers she created for the Festival of Britain.

Out There: Our Post-war Public Art, at Somerset House, was a comprehensive and well-researched survey of public sculpture in Britain, coinciding with Historic England’s listing of key pieces of public art at the start of 2016. As well as the historical context and aspirations surrounding the commissioning of public art, the exhibition gave an insight into the processes of creating public art, with a number of drawings and maquettes on display.

At Hebden Bridge Arts Festival I stumbled across Simon Ford’s Apocalypse Haywain in an abandoned bowls club in the woods. Apocalypse Haywain brought together a collection of charity shop-purchased and subsequently flood-damaged editions of Constable’s famous painting, each slightly varying from the original in colour, quality and scale. Shown collectively, they raised questions around landscape and human and cultural impact, change/transience, value, preservation and collecting.

Barnaby Festival showed me plenty of places in Macclesfield I would have never visited otherwise, from churches to parks. Bedwyr Williams’ video commission was a fantastical tale set in the town, and I enjoyed climbing the steep, ramshackle stairs of the Print Room to see Hondartza Fraga’s delicate drawings of nearby Jodrell Bank, but the highlight was Liliane Lijn’s Moonmeme in Savage Tower, a cyclical exploration of femininity.

I enjoyed the international range of photos, plans, drawings and videos relating to play on display at The Playground Project at the Baltic, Gateshead, exploring the history of playgrounds and their links with new developments in art, architecture and pedagogy.

A late highlight was John Akomfrah’s split-screen video installation Vertigo Sea at the Turner Contemporary in Margate, which brought together art film, documentary and period drama with nature observation to explore the multiplicity of time, life stories and histories. Using archival film and new footage – including striking aerial views – Akomfrah passes through the seasons to depict nature inland and outlying, through close-up shots of birds and butterflies, as well as showing the ways in which man has used the landscape, past and present, through activities such as work and hunting. The film is both beautiful and horrific, politicised through the inclusion of slavery and migration – Akomfrah uses footage of Vietnamese boat people – and topical: time is subverted by the inclusion of constantly ticking clocks. It can’t help but make you contemplate the horrors that are done to humans by humans – and think about bigger human impacts such as climate change.

2016 was a bittersweet year for the Manchester art scene, as gentrification got real – out goes the ramshackle artists' colony of Rogue Studios, in comes the neon pink-on-chipboard branding of the property developer circling round one of the few remaining undeveloped city centre mills. The end of an era has been marked by artists coming together to respond to the uncertainty of the situation, celebrate the creativity that's been incubated there, and to forge new and overdue collaborations with the small-scale textile producers who also just about cling on – one of the highlights was Sam Meech’s Unique Editions, which created knitted portraiture of the workers at Unique Knitwear, as well as limited edition scarves and jumpers.

Elsewhere in Greater Manchester I enjoyed Castlefield Gallery’s programme, particularly Christian Falsnaes' First, which required the visitors to the gallery to create the artwork, in front of a camera, prompted by a series of requests and questions: it was up to you how much of yourself you put on show. Manchester Left Writers' Launch Pad show, themed around the Northern Powerhouse, was a real challenge but a rewarding experience and an opportunity to try something new and different ways of working and collaborating, including creative writing and performance. The programme at the Holden Gallery also got stronger and stronger in 2016, culminating in From Slow to Stop Stop, a well-chosen collection of photos of videos exploring mobility (or lack of).

I enjoyed Factory at Mirabel and Joe Fletcher Orr’s self-referential show at the International 3, as well as Hannah Leighton Boyce’s installation exploring the sounds of industry at Touchstones in Rochdale, and a screening of Jennet Thomas’s controversial, grotesque and farcical depiction of Thatcher in the Unspeakable Freedom Device at International Anthony Burgess Foundation, organised by the Exhibition Centre for the Life and Use of Books.

I was really impressed by the Bankley Studios open in Levenshulme, particularly Patricia Azevedo and Clare Charnley’s film-work and-and which depicted pairs of hands, challenged to collaborate in a series of seemingly simple everyday activities usually performed with ease by one person. I particularly enjoyed the Manchester School of Art Degree show in 2016, including the drawn installations of Siân Leyson. The textiles section made me want to fill my future home with colourful textiles, and the Mancunian Way magazine, exploring life and history in Manchester, including an issue dedicated to Bradford Colliery, was a thing of beauty.

Film

Room was one of the first films I saw in 2016, and I immediately decided it should win all of the Oscars. The film’s storytelling and performances were exceptionally powerful, making me feel the whole repertoire of human emotions – fear, anger, disgust, sadness, disbelief and despair, but also somehow hope and even a bit of joy.

Room set the standard, but 2016 continued in the same calibre. Icelandic fable Rams, with its portrayal of obstinate and isolated brothers, was another powerful depiction of human relationships, throwing into question individual decisions and moral judgements.

Another tale of obstinacy, deception and betrayal I enjoyed was Australian film The Daughter, with its complication of the already fraught period of growing up and parent-child relationships. Likewise, I thought Julieta was classic Almodóvar, a sophisticated and lingering tale of wrong steps taken and the consequences of decisions made years in the past. Mustang was an eye-opener, combining teenage spirit, sisterly solidarity and tragedy in a patriarchal Turkish family with nascent friendship and desire for freedom.

I, Daniel Blake also had emotional resonance, depicting the futility and pointlessness of the administration of the benefits system, but also the ways in which people pull together for support. In addition to its immediate emotional impact, it’s a reminder that Daniel’s story is just one out of countless private tragedies that take place behind the headlines.

Nostalgia for the Light, by Chilean director Patricio Guzmán, was one of my favourite films of recent years, but I thought its follow-up, The Pearl Button, was even better. The Pearl Button focuses on the Patagonian archipelago and the indigenous tribes who lived alongside the water. It lulls the viewer into a false sense of security with beautiful natural footage, before introducing the oppression that befell them, then following on by discussing Pinochet’s dictatorship and the plight of the desaparecidos and their families. The film is powerful, moving and emotionally charged, and also has space and stars running through it, in reference to Chile’s astronomy programme. Embrace of the Serpent similarly benefited from the spectacular scenery of its Latin American setting, intertwining the history of the people of the Amazon with the story of one man, the explorer and scholar Theo von Martius.

Fire At Sea brought together individual and collective storytelling to explore the impact of the ongoing refugee crisis on the remote Italian island of Lampedusa, focusing on friendship, family, childhood and growing up, as well as the plight of those attempting to cross the Mediterranean.

I absolutely loved Greek film Chevalier’s tense and absurd exploration of masculinity, set around a luxury boat and involving bizarre and pointless tests of one-upmanship. The scene where the underdog character dons a feather boa and unexpectedly breaks into Minnie Riperton’s Loving You in pitch-perfect falsetto was my favourite moment of any film this year. The Coen Brothers’ latest film, Hail, Caesar!, featuring a guest appearance from Herbert Marcuse in a modernist-loving communist secret circle, was also very camp and silly, and made me laugh more than any other film this year.

My favourite animated film was April and the Extraordinary World, a dystopian tale of a girl scientist and her talking cat stuck in a world suspended in the steam age.

I saw lots of documentaries in 2016 but particularly enjoyed In the Company of Joan, a documentary about the theatre director Joan Littlewood shown at the Working Class Movement Library in Salford. The film used interviews and talking heads to give a sense of Littlewood’s strong personality, and her links and friendships with figures ranging from the singer Ewan MacColl in the 1930s to young actors. The film explored Littlewood’s Marxist/communist political convictions, and her mission to take theatre out to the people by touring theatres in working-class industrial areas before setting up a permanent theatre in Stratford in the east end if London. One of the best things about the film was the wide range of activity it conveyed: Littlewood’s impact went far beyond theatre to include involvement in bombsites, fun palaces and avant-garde bubble cities.

Another documentary I enjoyed was Huw Wahl's Action Space, which focused on a 1970s collective who set up travelling inflatable play sculptures, believing in the power of art to educate, inspire and change the world.

I enjoyed Nick Jordan and Jacob Cartwright’s Last Acre, a short documentary about the alternative lifestyles of people living on the edge of the world in Barrow-in-Furness. I also enjoyed Clara Casian’s Bird Song – Stories from Pripyat, which revisited the scene of the nuclear disaster with new interviews and vintage film, plus an evocative and understated score from Dutch Uncles’ Robin Richards.

When We Were B-Boys succeeded in depicting not just the early 1980s breakdancing scene in Nottingham but friendship, resourcefulness, eccentricity and family ties – both by birth and those based around shared culture and community.

Television

If more television was like Charlie Brooker’s Black Mirror I might watch far more of it. Like Rachel MacClean’s show at Home, Black Mirror is excruciatingly of the present-day; much of it is set in a future which could conceivably be just around the corner, creating a sense of unease and horror that stays with you.

Featuring six episodes, from the touching San Junipero to the pastel-hued suburbia of Nosedive, that could have each been a feature film in its own right, the series touched on big ethical questions and topics such as war, otherness, social inclusion/exclusion and punishment and retribution. The relatability of much of the narrative and its characters meant the twists were genuinely surprising.

Theatre

Beyond Caring at Home was one of the best pieces of theatre I’ve ever seen. Set in our precarious times, it brought to life the topical issues of zero hour, low-paid contracts and lack of workers’ rights. The small cast were completely convincing in their portrayals of power, desperation and frustration, and small moments of friendship and madness.

I took my dad to see Sunny Afternoon at Manchester Opera House as his fathers’ day present. The musical tells the story of the Kinks, telling tales of fraught family relationships and love stories yet portraying them as simple boys made good. Sometimes sweet and often hilarious, it’s a cautionary tale about the perils of fame.

Cycle rides

I’d long wanted to explore the Middlewood Way, an old railway line running through the green Cheshire countryside that is now a cycle route, having been past it on the train line between Manchester and the Peak District. I took the opportunity to cycle to Macclesfield along the Middlewood Way, getting on it in High Lane, where the outer reaches of Stockport meet the countryside. Although the trail itself is flat, it gives views of the surrounding hills, and quaint villages such as Bollington, as well as local landmark White Nancy in the distance. I cycled back along the Macclesfield Canal, a slightly more windy and muddy route, taking in aqueducts, boats, geese, goslings and ducklings, and offering views of another local folly, the Cage at Lyme Park.

Another old railway line, the Lymm line, gave a welcome traffic-free section of cycling to another Cheshire market town, Northwich, and its famous boat lift. The journey was full of thatched cottages and one of the most picturesque towns I’ve ever seen, Great Budworth, complete with sloping cobbled streets, a well, village churches, leaning houses, a library in a phone box and even a scarecrow competition featuring Tim Peaks in straw form!

Trips and walks

I visited some more British cities for the first time in 2016, including Nottingham, which feels and looks very much like a city of the north. A visit to Nottingham wouldn’t have been complete without a trip to Beeston to see Owen Jones’ vast, modernist Boots factory, but I also enjoyed walking around the city, from the tree-lined sweeping private streets of the Park, a centrally located community of mansions, to Nottingham University’s lakeside campus. I also went inside a Rough Trade record shop for the first time in several years, and found it to be a very different beast to the Rough Trades I visited as a teenager – far from the cramped, underground Rough Trade in Covent Garden, with layers of competing stickers on every surface, Rough Trade nowadays looks more like a lifestyle emporium, selling not just records but coffee, beer, books, DVDs and clothes, and even containing a novelty selfie booth.

Lincoln also felt like a city of the north, both in its geographical distance/isolation from the rest of the country, and in its cultural distance: it felt like stepping back in time several decades. Lincoln cathedral, with its Duncan Grant murals, is wondrous, and it’s pretty around the aptly-named Steep Hill area. However, my favourite thing about Lincoln is Imperial Teas, a purveyor of exotic and unusual loose leaf tea (I took home coconut tea, black tea blended with big flakes of coconut). It wasn’t cheap, but was worth it: Imperial Teas is the only tea shop I’ve been to that rivals my favourite place to buy loose leaf tea, J Atkinson in Lancaster.

Harlow new town was big, vast, traffic-filled and sprawling, like a more run-down, less glamorous and more spread out version of Coventry that was not kind to the pedestrian visitor. I was one of several visitors clutching a map of the public sculptures of Harlow, and saw a large number of sculptures in the centre, the highlight of which was William Mitchell’s Water Gardens fountains. Such was the scale of the town that I didn’t make it to any of the residential estates. I did, however, visit the outskirts of Harlow for architect Frederick Gibberd’s magical, enchanting, riverside garden. Soon after my visit the Twentieth Century Society ran a tour of Harlow by bike, which makes a lot more sense than attempting to see everything on foot.

Model village Silver End, a little island of modernism deep in the Essex countryside, was worth an afternoon’s wander around its estates of flat-rooved, Crittal-windowed houses. The bigger houses had seen much better days. Similarly, Bataville was planned uniformity for workers in Tilbury, a subtle hierarchy apparent in the semi-detached managers’ houses.

I continued my trips to the new campus universities of the 1960s by visiting the famous ziggurats of the University of East Anglia in Norwich, a landscaped campus that comes complete with its own broad and is full of sculptures.

I finally visited Hungarian architect Ernő Goldfinger’s modernist home at 2 Willow Road, Hampstead. Featuring the Goldfingers’ impressive collection of mid-twentieth century artworks (my favourites being Max Ernst’s painted pebbles), it was well worth the wait for a glamorous glimpse of artistic life in 1930s suburban Hampstead, as well giving an idea of Goldfinger’s interests and practice. Unusually for National Trust properties, the experience was surprisingly intimate and his house, which included a nursery and wooden toys, actually felt like a family home.

In complete contrast, I was absolutely fascinated by the Haven plotlands museum, based in the sole remaining plotlands house at Laindon, near Basildon. Intended as temporary holiday dwellings, whole communities and generations decamped from East London to Laindon in the war and lived for decades on small plots of land, growing fruit and vegetables, keeping chickens out the back and cycling to the train station for work. Eventually, the residents were moved out to the new town of Basildon in the late-1970s. The area was retained as a nature reserve, and the houses were allowed to return to nature. A 76-ear-old volunteer who was born and raised in a plotlands house gave a tour, and pointed out details such as the rag walls and rag rugs.

I loved exploring another old railway line in Lancaster, lined with wild raspberries and cherries, and seeing the river curve round dramatically at Crook O’Lune. Nearby is Halton, with its eco-friendly riverside co-housing development, and a mill co-operatively run as a creative space.

The long trek over to Ashington by train, bus and foot was rewarded by seeing the pitmen painters collection at Woodhorn, documenting everyday life, work and leisure in the north east.

I spent some time in 2016 exploring more of the British coastline, from Ravenglass and Grange-over-Sands up in the North West to Newbiggen-by-the-sea in the North East to the estuarine seasides of Southend-on-Sea and Canvey Island, which felt like part of London, with its sea walls with murals depicting natural life in the Thames estuary, as well as local legends Dr Feelgood.

I’d always thought Kent, and in particular Folkestone, was flat, but a walk up the Folkestone Downs made me realise how wrong I was. It took me years and years to get round to visiting, but now it’s one of my favourite places in Folkestone. Also in Kent, I enjoyed walking off into the marshes at Faversham creek.

Hastings is one of the few places on the south coast I could ever imagine living, and its appeal was increased by my discovery of a wooded, cliff-top country park. I spent a very satisfying two hours rambling to the suburban, nondescript village of Fairlight, past reservoirs and with a detour scrambling down a hillside for a brief for a onto a rocky, secluded, nudist beach.

However, my new favourite bit of coastline is between Seawick, Lee-over-Sands and Colne Point on the Essex coast. This open, marshy space is criss-crossed by creeks and accessed by small lanes from the village of St Osyth. It will appeal to anyone for whom Dungeness is too built-up, accessible and touristy. Home to yet another nudist beach, the sea creates large, oozing banks of muddy clay, and the beach is littered with bricks and broken up bits of old buildings. It floods regularly: one of the most recently built dwellings is a cork-covered space pod on stilts, which inspired my favourite piece of writing on architecture this year, by the Guardian's Rowan Moore.

Swims

Swimming in Southend felt like swimming in the Thames, with the traffic of the river going past. Another swim with a spectacular view was at Dovercourt, with its two antique lighthouses, overlooking the huge container boats and cranes of Harwich.

Also in Essex I swam in the muddy, seaweedy sea at Brightlingsea and next to the piped pop music and gaudy rides of the pier at Clacton, underneath an abandoned museum to pirate radio.

In the quiet Kent hop town of Faversham the lido seemed to be the busiest place, with its fake rapids and impromptu diving contest.

The sandy, shallow waters of Pickmere were a welcome break on the cycle ride to Northwich, but down the road I stumbled across my new favourite lido, the elegant, cold pool in the middle of wooded Marbury Park.

Indoors, I visited the shabby, eccentric, wiggle-shaped pool in the basement of Sunlight House, with its mural giving the impression of being on a retro cruiseliner, and pools in old mills/warehouses in Sackville Street and Broadstone Mill, Reddish.

Records

My favourite song of the year was Up to Anything by the Goon Sax, jangly indie-pop that I could just listen to over and over again all day.

Every time I heard Charles Bradley’s world-weary You Think I Don’t Know (But I Do) it made me stop and wonder where I’d heard it before – which I think is the idea. This sounds familiar both in its classic soul sound and the experiences behind it.

David Bowie kept on reinventing himself until the end: I kept hearing Blackstar on the radio and thinking it was by Scott Walker. With its stately, muted, strange, restrained vocal over ethereal, beating, synthy electronica, Blackstar also brings to mind Kid A, Radiohead’s foray into dance-pop.

Hope Sandoval, one of the greatest rock voices of the 1990s, teamed up with one of this decade’s most distinctive voices, Kurt Vile, for Let Me Get There. Sandoval’s smooth, sultry, sexy, frail otherworldliness is placed next to the rough and rasping, down to earth, countrified tones of Kurt Vile, and it works – like all good collaborations, each enhances the other. The swirling organ, tremolo guitar and woozy chord changes of the Warm Inventions makes Let Me Get There feel a little like an updated version of the romantic languor of Neil Young’s Harvest Moon which is, coincidentally, one of my favourite songs of all-time.

I also enjoyed the day-glo powerchord pop of Taco Cat’s I Hate the Weekend, a bratty sentiment I can definitely agree with, Scott and Charlene’s Wedding’s raw, rickety, straightforward, catchy, feel-good punk, and the bouncy, bleepy electronic fun of Go Ahead by Pillow Person.

Requiem by extraordinary Swedish six-piece psych-folk band Goat is a full-on, multi-layered collage of tribal drums, polyrhythms, field recordings, hand claps, reverb, nursery rhyme-esque melodies, flutes and twisty, spindly, bagpipe-esque guitar solos. It’s a complicated, messy noise, but it’s pop. One of the highlights is Union of Sun and Moon, with its chanting and deliberately untuneful (and thus life-affirming) recorder duet.

Whyte Horse’ Pop Or Not is sassy, full-bodied retro-pop in the vein of Broadcast. Highlights are Promise I Do and the French-language La Couleur Originelle.

I enjoyed the portentous, theatrical, flamboyant marching post-punk pop of Tim Presley’s the Wink – and one of its quieter moments, the Big Star-eque Morris.

Gigs

Meilyr Jones played the part of the pop star at Sounds From the Other City in Salford, hiding in and out of the nooks and crannies of beautiful St Philip’s Church.

Electric 50, an eclectic 50th anniversary tribute to Bob Dylan going electric at the Free Trade Hall in Manchester, with highlights including Thick Richard, Vampire Dub and Vocal Harum, was a special birthday treat.

Manchester band Pins covered the Bunker in Salford in tinfoil and played Velvet Underground covers in a cage in a tribute to Warhol’s Factory: there was an illicit, underground and very arty feel about it.

Sitting on a tree stump in Range Road Community Garden in Whalley Range on a late spring/early summer’s night, eating home-made chilli, was a perfect venue for the avant-garde folk and country of Joshua Burkett, Crystalline Roses, John Collin and the Gamecock.

On the other hand, the Albert Hall always oversells its gigs, resulting in a venue that is horribly, stressfully crowded. Goat just about made it bearable, with two gold-caped singers jumping around like animals and tall feathered headdresses. With Grace Slick-esque singing, and the use of percussion such as agogo bells, they stay just the right side of prog.

Books

JD Taylor’s travelogue Island Story, an epic journey surveying the country and its inhabitants and trying to understand its political and cultural inclinations, made me want to set out on my bike (read my review for Manchester review of books here).

Nick Dunn’s Dark Matters: A Manifesto for the Nocturnal City, captured the distinct pleasures of urban walking in poetry and prose, rendering the familiar places of Greater Manchester remarkable and the ordinary extraordinary (read my interview with Nick here).

Owen Hatherley’s Ministry of Nostalgia brings together a series of critiques of the ways in which the aesthetics of the post-war period – or a certain nostalgia for it – influences twenty first century culture at a time of austerity. Hatherley shows how history is written to suit our own narratives, portraying Britishness as a powerful composite of imagery and symbols.

I expect I’m similar to many people in that hearing the Jesus and Mary Chain’s Psychocandy for the first time as a teenager was an arresting, transformative moment that changed what I knew and felt about pop music. Paula Mejia’s Psychocandy is the latest in supremely nerdy series 33 and 1/3, in which writers take on seminal albums in academic detail. Mejia’s in-depth analysis of Psychocandy convincingly sets the scene for the album in the Reid brothers’ home town, bleak Scottish new town East Kilbride, eight miles outside Glasgow yet seemingly of another world, at the same time as drawing out the links between their wall of noise and pop precedents such as the Ronettes. It’s also interesting to read an American’s take on post-war reconstruction and rebuilding, and the political and economic context of Thatcherism and miners’ strikes.

Artist Tirzah Garwood’s autobiography Long Live Great Bardfield, republished by Persephone Books in 2016 more than 60 years after her death with a new introduction by her daughter Anne Ullmann and illustrated with photographs and etchings, is a weighty and satisfying read. Born in 1908 and brought up in an upper-middle-class family in genteel Eastbourne, it’s a glimpse into a different time, when middle-class women’s main role was to marry well. Often snobbish in her descriptions of those she meets, and strange and apparently naïve in some of the ways she looked at the world – for example, Garwood was keen to have children in order to stop the monthly inconveniences of menstruation – at other times Garwood writes about sex and relationships with a surprising frankness, even going as far as to liken the birth of her third child to orgasm. She also writes honestly and maturely about her husband, Eric Ravilious’ love affairs. The book is made poignant not just by Ravilious’ loss in a plane over Iceland in 1942, but by Garwood’s documentation of operations for recurrent breast cancer, from which she eventually died at the age of 43, leaving behind three young children. Though Garwood writes little about her practice as an artist in her own right – she was too busy being a wife, mother and lover – her autobiography places her at the heart of an artistic circle that included the Great Bardfield group of artists in Essex, as well as the friendship group based around Peggy Angus’ country cottage the Furlongs in East Sussex.

I also enjoyed Modern Futures, which brings together personal and creative engagements with modernist architecture and Jonathan Hoskins’ Own De Beauvoir!, a semi-fictional account of gentrification, protest, regeneration, creativity and untold histories in one small area of North East London (read my review for Manchester review of books here).

Radio

I enjoyed Bob Dickinson’s bewildering Three-sided Football on BBC 4, exploring the game’s Situationist roots as well as the teams that still play it today.

Katie Puckrik’s Power Pop on Radio 6 Music played lots of shiny, radio-friendly power-pop hits, playing some of my favourites at the same time as introducing me to lots of previously unknown bands.