'All About Love’ is BUILDHOLLYWOOD’s first major curatorial and artist commission, taking over large-format billboards across Birmingham, Brighton, Bristol, Glasgow, Edinburgh and Manchester between April – December 2023. The project champions artists who are either born in those cities or live and work there. It is curated by Zarina Rossheart.
Commissioned artists:
Grace Ndiritu for Birmingham
Jasleen Kaur for Glasgow
Eve Stainton for Manchester
Helen Cammock for Brighton
Asmaa Jama for Bristol
Alberta Whittle for Edinburgh
'You can take the ___ out of ___', Eve Stainton, 2023
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.’ Interested in its capacity for politically contradicting sentiments depending on who is saying it to whom, and how, Eve is drawing attention to the phrase simultaneously dealing with belonging, cultural identification, solidarity and empowerment, as well as classist, gendered and nationalistic intentions.
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 ______’ to encourage an independent relationship with the viewer who can seemingly insert their own language/pronoun/city/idea, as well as supporting a questioning of words and meaning. These welded words have then been placed matter of factly on to a psychedelic collaged landscape made up of images of Eve’s previous performance work, their own body and neoprene pieces, which also deal with identity, class and gender; a further proliferation of meanings.
Here and there the word Manchester will be spotted across the billboards, to playfully reference Eve’s personal love and connection to the city they grew up in, acknowledging the traces, aesthetics and vibes that still permeate their work uncannily today.
Courtesy the artist. Collages featuring photography by David Laskowski, Stephen Bishop, Anne Tetzlaff, El Hogg and Eve Stainton