Feed the 5000 Biennial opening night Independent District

	Daisy Delaney A thousand windmills Liverpool Biennial 2004

	White Diamond The Transparent Eyeball Liverpool Biennial 2004

	Scott Jones 3345 Liverpool Biennial 2004

Jim Medway

Independent District

Greenland Street

Untitled (wall drawing) and Swan

Under an iron bridge, Jim Medway’s feline predators kiss inebriated arc-lit sidewalks. Medway’s vision of Manchester echoes that of that great melancholic, Salfordian punk bard John Cooper Clarke, a consummate vernacular witness of Northern night life:

The rain whips
The promenade
It drips on chips
They turn to lard
I’d send a card if I had a pen
I mustn’t go down to the sea again

A string of pearls
From the bingo bar
For a girl
Who looks like Ringo Starr
She’s mad about married men
I mustn’t go down to the sea again.

Medway has a similar talent for satirising the rowdy, boozy sexuality found in the centre of most British cities on a Friday night. He illustrates the grim sconce of Manchester hidden by PR exercises designed to make the city appear modern and cosmopolitan. Of course, the omnipresence of sportswear clad ‘rat boys’, always on the alert for a blag, is as much a myth as any other.

By representing council kids and their parents as syrupy cats, Medway accentuates the mythologisation of the lowbrow welfare culture that caricatures post-industrial towns in the North of England.

There are as many Manchesters as there are Mancunians. The city is whatever people want it to be; two light ales, stripwood-floored lofts, the gay village, sniffing glue in bus shelters. Medway’s Swan – a can of cigarette lighter fluid painted to resemble an old floral canal barge and thrown into Rochdale Canal – captures this multiplicity beautifully.

The ‘old’ industrial Manchester marketed by the heritage industry is tossed away like a cigarette butt. It slips out of the city centre past the polished steel and glass of converted warehouse apartments

Extract from exhibition essay by curator Dr Neil Mulholland