Época

We are extremely excited to see the extInked project featured on the website of Época, a weekly publication in Brazil. To see the finished article entitled 'Tatuagens para salvar a natureza' (Tattoos to save Nature) please click here, alternatively you can visit the extInked blog for a translated version.

Corridor 8 Magazine

We were surprised to find ourselves included in a new publication, Corridor 8, this month included amongst artists such as Freee Collective and Superflex.

We're in the Manchester cluster in the Magnetic North map of artist led groups designed by dust and Laura Mansfield. It's the centrefold, on pages 31 and 32 and the magazine costs £10.99. We bought it at the Cornerhouse, but you could buy it from Amazon if you fancy it.

Exam - CityLife

by Sarah Walters

"...threatening to overshadow almost everything else [in the Queer Up North Festival] on the calendar is the return of Ultimate Holding Company, an art group best known for previously recreating Guantanamo Bay in Hulme for 10 days. Six years later, it invited 100 volunteers to be tattooed with the names of endangered species in Extinked.

The group returns with Exam, the brainchild of Joe Richardson and Jai Redman, developed with local community groups. What is it? Well, your guess is as good as ours, but frankly we’re terrified by the brief: ‘One thing is certain,’ it warns, ‘you will be tested’."

Read the original article at: www.citylife.co.uk

Exam - Gathering Speed!

The preparations for Exam are well under way, candidate places are booking up fast and all elements of the day are coming together brilliantly. We are extremely excited about our beautiful range of eflyers and wanted to share them with you. To download the full range of flyers please visit the Exam webpage.

Ext Inked article in this months issue of Chimp.

Ext Inked features in the February 2010 issue of Manchester's Chimp Magazine, unfortunately the article is not online so if you would like to have a read you will have to pop out and buy a copy.

ExtInked Press

Amelia's Magazine by Adam Sutcliffe
Amelia's Magazine by Grace Beaumont
BBC Manchester
Discover Magazine by Andrew Moseman
The Guardian by Jenny Jones
The Guardian by Hugh Warwick
New Scientist by Jessica Griggs
The Mule by Samantha Bradey
South Manchester Reporter by Amy Glendinning

Chimp Magazine Manchester by Martin G-H

Art Not Oil Diary

Art Not Oil has included two pieces of ours in their diary for 2010, and with 33% of the profits going towards the Art Not Oil campaign, and 67% going to communities resisting oil and gas extraction in the global south, we are proud to support the project.

Arnolfini Exhibition: C Words

The well-travelled Carbon Map, commissioned by Platform, has been included in another show at Arnolfini running from 3 October to 29 November. The image of the map (below) was used to promote the 50 day investigation of the C Words: carbon, climate, capital and culture by 60 artists, activists, campaigners and educators.

Joe Richardson in the Observer

Ultimate Holding Company artist Joe Richardson gets a mention in Sunday's Observer from comedian Mark Thomas, for an artwork featuring Princess Diana. The work, shown above in the bottom right-hand corner, is cited by Thomas as one of his most treasured possessions in a tour of his study for the 'My Space' column of the lifestyle magazine:

"Diana Spencer print: I'm friends with a Manchester-based art collective called UHC. A few years ago they were showing me round their studio when I saw this and thought it was brilliant. I've forgotten how much they sold it to me for, £40 or something"

Click here for the full article.

NB. The work is not a print, but a unique mixed media art work.

Filter Magazine

Filter Magazine, a publication by the Australian Network for Art and Technology (ANAT), recently went online and amongst some of the other great work on their website they also showcase some of our older projects (including a couple of projects we don't have on our website); the Spring Shrouds, H.O.B.O and the Parking Meter Mourning Hood.

EXT INKED hit the radio waves!

106.1 Rock Radio Manchester invited Jai Redman and Timo Ten Feld to join Steve Berry on the breakfast show to talk about EXT INKED the forth coming UHC project celebrating Charles Darwin’s 200th birthday.

To download and listen again to this interview please see the EXT INKED profile page.

The Carbon Map

The Carbon Map created by UHC in 2007 as a commission for Platform for the Transport Planning Society will soon be on show at Arnolfini, a centre for contemporary arts in Bristol.

Artist-activist group PLATFORM and their collaborators propose C Words, a two-month investigation into carbon, climate, capital and culture. Based on PLATFORM's 25 years of research, art and action, C Words cross-examines the present and looks to the next two decades. How did we get here? Where are we going? Who's deciding? Who's made invisible? Whose future matters? PLATFORM members will be in residence at Arnolfini throughout the project.

Over 25 events, installations, performances, actions, walks, courses, discussions and skills-sharing will build towards the moment of public departure to the protests at the contested COP 15 in Copenhagen. This isn't art which merely describes the problems of climate justice. C Words investigates how everything from carbon offsets and transport, to racism and bank accounts play their part in the carbon web. How will culture be produced in a low energy future? Can we imagine our way from here to there?

The Carbon Map will form part of the exhibition entitled - C Words: Carbon, Climate, Capital, Culture, How did you get here and where are we going? The show will open on Saturday 3rd October 2009 through to Sunday 29th November.

Dyeing Breeds

Ext Inked has received further acclaim in the August 09 issue of Bizarre Magazine (UK). The article features information about UHC's latest and most controversial new art venture which invites 100 volunteers to become 'ambassadors' for a threatened species of insect, animal or plant and have a picture of it tattooed on their skin. Bizarre have also been given an exclusive peek at several of the designs including the Great Yellow Bumble Bee and the Erratic Ant created by UHC's co-founder Jai Redmen.

To find out more about Ext Inked or to register your interest in becoming an ambassador please visit the UHC website.

One and All

Our very own Joe Richardson was one of eight artists invited to take part in the 'I Don't Know About Community Networks But I Know What I Like' project organised by Alison Kershaw. The works were featured in the One and All exhibition at the Castlefield Galley, which ran from 3 April to 17 May 2009. 

   

 A review of this exhibition featured in the June issue of A-N Magazine.

Limited Edition Sushi

UHC has had the pleasure of working with Greenpeace for the Limited Edition Sushi Campaign, the aim of which is to stop trendy restaurant Nobu selling endangered species on their menu.

We are happy to see this campaign featured in the London Evening Standard newspaper and hope that through generating awareness for this issue people will realise that serving endangered species in restaurants such as Nobu is not cool!  

To find out more about this campaign please visit www.greenpeace.org.uk/nobu and watch www.endoftheline.com.

EXT INKED - en4m.org.uk

100 tattoos for conservation

"EXT INKED aims to show that our generation cares about the future of all species and is prepared to prove it in blood, sweat and tears", explain the organisers.

The project is launched today, on Darwin's birthday. "We really feel that Darwin would appreciate our desire to creatively celebrate evolution, the sheer beauty of these species and the human effort needed to save them," a participating artist writes.

EXT INKED is a new art project from Ultimate Holding Company, in conjunction with the Marine Conservation Society and Buglife (The Invertebrate Conservation Trust). Ultimate Holding Company is an award-winning, radical art and design collective operating in the heart of Manchester since 2002.

Volunteers will be permanently tattooed with the image of their chosen mammal, invertebrate, bird, reptile, fish or plant.

To keep EXT INKED free and avoid sponsorship, they are aiming to raise £5,000 from the public. They want the event to be free to attend and hope that it will attract a new wave of interest in conservationism.

With every successful free tattoo the project will create a new ambassador for another threatened species - a living exhibition of Charlie’s other angels!

If you think EXT INKED is a good idea and would like to help then sign up to the newsletter on their website linked below.

"It is interesting to contemplate an entangled bank, clothed with many plants of many kinds, with birds singing on the bushes, with various insects flitting about and with worms crawling through the damp earth, and to reflect that these elaborately constructed forms, so different from each other, are dependent on each other in so complex a manner, have all been produced by laws acting around us...” -Charles Darwin 'On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection'

Arts Council News

UHC water table recieves futher acclaim in the August issue of Arts Council 'News'. The article highlights the success of The Water Table grabbing bronze prize in the prestigious Show Garden Catagory, adding to its 'already impressive tally of horticultural awards'. Being described as innovative and beautiful, the project recieved a glowing report from the executive Director of Arts Council England,

"Congratulations to all those who have brought this innovative project together. The Arts Council is delighted to support ventures which have such a creative reach into the commnutiy. We feel sure Metal's partnership with southend will grow from strength top strength."

Creative Review

UHC has been mentioned for our work with Climate Camp in Jody Boenhart's article, In The Front Line in this months Creative Review (October 08):

Design at the Climate Camp

Each year the camp has worked with the Manchester-based studio Ultimate Holding Company (UHC) to create an integrated campaign (website, posters, flyers, stickers, etc.). The leading image for the 2008 camp was a Swiss army knife, out of which all the tools of activism extended: here is a wrench, book, wind turbine, loud speaker, rubber boot, carrot, and flower. The camp also produced a newspaper, You Are Here, in an edition of 20,000. Subtle headlines, text and images draw you into the issues slowly. Climate change is not even mentioned or alluded to until several pages into the paper. John Jordan worked on the paper and is one of the key design activists at the camp. The intention, he claims, is “to make publicity materials which have the slickness of corporate media yet the punch of rebel flyers, the poetic writing of literature yet the political analysis of radical theory, the desirability of capitalist design, yet the subversiveness of anarchist thinking”.

The crisp design produced by the Climate Camp is removed from the typical anarchist/Marxist/revolutionary visual codes of earlier activists movements. The Climate Camp’s graphic identity aims to be attractive to everyday people; it is accessible and asks everyone to participate. Gone are the stencilled or dirty grunge fonts that are identified with your counter-cultures. In an era when our rebellion has been sold back to us for so long that the aesthetics of rebellion are virtually meaningless, the Climate Camp has avoided positioning itself with any of the counter-culture based identity politics of earlier activists movements that could never escape the anarchist ghetto. So far, the camp has stayed clear of old ideology-based rhetoric and imagery, but is a constant battle to maintain a fresh perspective and communications strategy.

How does the relationship between the designer and client differ from a commercial situation? Here the client is the networking group of the camp. UHC describes the dynamic: “We begin from their starting point, that is to say – the brief is ‘to save the world now’ and the target audience is ‘everyone’. It can be hard pleasing everyone, with such a vociferously non-hierarchical, decentralised, voluntary and deeply committed group. Every year we nearly have to start building relationships from scratch, because the client is a shifting group. After three years we now have a good relationship with one or two people who have remained constant and are design savvy.”

The Independent

Included in the The Independent's special supplement for the climate clinic at the Labour Party Conference is our "e.on f.off" slogan as used by activists in their battle against the company's efforts to paint itself 'green' whilst building an unsustainable coal power plant at Kingsnorth in Kent.

Water Table on BBC

UHC's Water Table, commissioned by national arts organisation Metal, was beautifully showcased in the BBC's footage of the Hampton Court Flower Show. As a common point of interest for all involved, the garden took climate change and its effects as the starting point of the design, but also aimed to reflect the social potential of a shared space.

The table, which first appears at 0:27 seconds in the youtube video, takes a leaf from the low water brassica family as the central design, and imagines it as an abstract map of the Thames Estuary. The veins of the leaf feature three very different sets of information: names of key foods in the Brassica family, the hidden underground rivers of London and the names of the Vicotian engineers that provided the ideas, the skills and the labour, to make access to clean water possible.