LIVERPOOL.- Work by an artist commissioned by Liverpool’s Bluecoat Gallery for a recent exhibition, The Negligent Eye (Mar-June 2014) will be distributed amongst a group of ‘custodians’ during the Islington Mill residency at The Black-E for Liverpool Biennial.

Created by Maurice Carlin over three months at the Bluecoat, Endless Pageless has evolved into a 10 x 4 metre hand-printed banner, recording CMYK ‘analogue scans’ of the gallery’s floor surfaces on pieced-together advertising card in sizes A0 to A10. The artwork will be disassembled during the Black- E residency and distributed amongst a community of ‘custodians’ – individuals and groups who will become the keeper/caretaker of an individual piece of the larger work.

Explaining his vision, Maurice said: “Anyone can be a custodian. I see custodianship presenting an opportunity for people to reconsider their own relationship to art and artistic production and to consider their own role as cultural consumers and/or collaborators.”

The process is based on the notion of an artwork as a ‘collection’ of interdependent relationships and as yet unknowable dynamics, inviting custodians to explore what it might mean for a work of art to become a shared asset held by audiences, artists and commissioners, in addition to the more usual museums, collections and collectors.

Specific contemporary and historical models of production and distribution such as post-war picture lending libraries and the internet as commons have provided reference points from which to go forward with this process.

Endless Pageless forms part of a wider conversation initiated by artists and organisers from Islington Mill in Salford, exploring new models for how to sustain independent collective cultural practices, and questioning how to take the mill as a building, community and ethos forward. These questions will be presented and explored further during The Black-E residency under the banner ‘Temporary Custodians of...’ a 3 day open forum of performances, conversations and potluck dinners.

Anyone interested in being a custodian of Endless Pageless or in joining the conversation, can go along to the Black-E or get in touch via: custodians@islingtonmill.com

Maurice Carlin is a Manchester based artist. His work merges performance, place and publishing to produce dialogues between digital and physical experience. Artworks explore perceptions around the information we receive and send, whether derived from a TV screen, via the internet or through a day to day experience on the street.

His work has been featured in publications including Frieze, The Guardian and Art Monthly. In 2007, he co-founded Islington Mill Art Academy, a peer-led experiment into alternative modes of art education. Recent shows include The Negligent Eye, The Bluecoat Gallery, Liverpool (2014), Self-Interruption, Jack Chiles Gallery, New York (2013), First...Next...Then...Finally, Castlefield Gallery, Manchester (2013), Blanco Blanco, La Escocesa, Barcelona (2012), Self Publisher and Other Works, Banner Repeater, London (2011).