Catalogue: The First Cut

While most of the temporary exhibitions at Manchester Art Gallery are accompanied by a publication, it was particularly important to develop a catalogue for the First Cut, an exhibition featuring 31 artists who cut, sculpt and manipulate paper to create artworks.

My co-curator Natasha Howes and I thought that our visitors would be keen to have something that would provide information about each of the artists and contain high-quality images.

We also thought that there would be a lot of interest from a wide demographic. There has been a huge expansion of artists working with paper in recent years. And while we were planning our show, the exhibition Slash: Paper Under the Knife, which was held at the Museum of Art and Design in New York in 2009-10, was very popular.

Second edition

However, we weren’t prepared for the huge popularity of the First Cut, which ran from 5 October last year to 27 January. The first print of the catalogue sold out in the opening weeks and we had to reprint it, which is unusual. We are still reeling from the visitor figures. Over 107,000 people came to the exhibition, which makes it our most popular to date.

We printed 2,000 copies and printed a further 3,000, as it was selling so well and we had to ensure that there were enough for our tour venues, Djanogly Art Gallery in Nottingham and Southampton’s SeaCity Museum.

It has worked well to print a second edition, as this has allowed us to include images of new commissions that weren’t available for the first edition.

We wanted the catalogue to be ready for the opening weekend in Manchester, which is traditionally when we sell most copies of an exhibition publication. But this timescale meant that we could not feature some of the installation shots.

In the reprint we have been able to include images of commissioned works in the gallery by James Aldridge, Andrea Mastrovito, Manabu Hangai, Andreas Kocks and Andrew Singleton, as well as paper dress works by the artists showing at our Gallery of Costume, Violese Lunn, Susan Cutts and Susan Stockwell.

Design and content

Having a large group show does make it difficult to choose one single image for the front cover and publicity materials. In the end, our designer devised a graphic that we used on all of our promotional print and the publication cover. We chose the scalpel blades idea after playing around with various concepts.

We felt this graphic, together with the First Cut title, best conveyed the spirit of the show. It is contemporary, refers to a key tool used by each of the artists in the exhibition, but isn’t focused purely on the craft aspect of working with paper and hinted at artworks that contained an edge.

We wanted the look and feel of the catalogue to reflect the subject matter, so there are different weights and types of paper used inside, for example.

We’re lucky that GF Smith, a national paper company, agreed to support the exhibition and supply paper for the book, promotional materials and public workshops.

However, we did not want the appearance of the publication to overwhelm the content – it was created to give information and represent the artworks in the exhibition, rather than as a design book.

The content was also really important as the catalogue gave us the chance to build on the interpretation in the exhibition. We were able to discuss the personal, social and political themes behind individual works in the essays.

Some of the works are spectacular and are full of craftsmanship, beauty and obsessive attention to detail.

The catalogue allowed us to interrogate the works on a deeper level, highlight links between specific works and artists and offer the visitor a book that would act as a reminder of the exhibition, and the gallery a legacy of an incredibly popular exhibition.

Fiona Corridan is a curator, exhibitions, at Manchester City Galleries