There's always change at... : Maike Hale-Jones

There's always change at... is an artists' book that is both a generational collaboration and a spectral and often anachronistic viewpoint of a post-industrial town on the brink of change but with its past still very much visible. Hale-Jones' vignetted prose posits this aching vantage of a damp, mildewy West Yorkshire childhood scattered with real and imagined sinister secrets and stalled incongruously at the junction of a generation's yearning for the colourful, synthetic world of the American blockbuster and the gooey fluorescence of frozen pizzas and Sky TV. Her father Dennis' hand-developed black and white photographs and illustrations punctuate this narrative thread, one which is comic, dreamlike and self-effacing and yet evocative of the poignance a communal prepubescent melancholy. Maike Hale-Jones is a writer, performer and arts educator for adults with learning disabilities. Her prose work was commissioned by curator Helen Nisbet for Chips and Egg, (The Sunday Painter, 2019), and Houses are really bodies (Cubitt Gallery, 2017).