Charity begins at home
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WHEN CJ O’Neill discusses Wesley, you begin to get the impression that he is a real person. And a much-loved friend at that.
Yet, O'Neill is actually Moss Side’s Wesley Community Furniture Project: a charity that has inspired a collaboration between her and local photographer, Lee Garland.
“The main idea was to document the activities, objects and people who work with the charity,” the artist tells us, “through photography, drawings and interviews: interpreting and developing this in a number of ways.”
Responsibility
Those fans of O’Neill’s ceramic pieces won’t be disappointed by the work. Continuing her knack for subverting second-hand crockery with additional surface pattern and waterjet cutting, she has also taken a number of influences from MMU’s Special Collections Gallery (where the finished work will be exhibited) and provided a historical context for the imagery that she and Garland collected in conjunction with the charity’s staff and customers.
Eventually available for sale at auction (with profits feeding directly back to the charity), she has produced a range of deceptively age-old silhouette-based one-off objects.
All of these document a fascinating environment, with nods to the volunteers and donations that are integral to its work, and while largely decorative the work still manages to raise questions regarding sustainability and social responsibility.
Each year, Wesley manages to redirect in excess of 165 tonnes of material that would otherwise be headed to a local landfill. Through a process of collection, repair and restoration, it distributes furniture and household items at the lowest prices possible to those people in most need.
Stories
“Working with the staff and the customers at Wesley on this project has allowed us to not only get deeper below the surface of the building, its role and the people who use it - but also to see it in the context of time,” O’Neill explains.
“Written over all aspects of the building - in its staff, in its routine, in its stock and all over its walls - the pattern of time and the layers of human stories are constantly being added to. And the evidence is there for all to see.
"It just requires a step back and a little bit of looking.”
Wesley Meets Art opens at MMU’s Special Collections Gallery 8th December.
Published: Thu, 27 November, 2008
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