Liquid nostalgia.

BYE BYE LIQUID.

It's been ages since I braved your alcopop/piss flooded dancefloor, and you were pretty horrible. But part of me died a bit inside when I heard you were closing. Oh there you are, right next to Wilkos.

Mansfield's not exactly incredible, but I've got this nostalgic fondness for my foundation year at college there. It was amazing to learn techniques for the first time and to watch the people around you grow as artists. One minute we were doing A4 pencil drawings, the next we were projecting our contorted faces onto slabs of meat. Well I was anyway. But you could just feel how enthusiastic everyone was; it was close, intense, small enough that we all knew eachother.

Looking back, the amount of support and advice we received was invaluable. It was all Svankmajer and Cunningham and joyously smashing down our boundaries with a giant jam-smeared haddock. I don't think I've ever been more excited about art, I probably churned out more work in that year than in my whole time at university. Not that I didn't enjoy my degree! It was just a different feel.

And on a good few Friday mornings we'd stagger into college, unwashed and hungover, from our 'mad night out' (look above at that, we were bloody MAD I tell you, and it was 2008?) at Liquid.

BAAAWWWW. Oh shut up.

It can't have been that good, really? It's weird how memory works. Here's a great bit of writing I found about nostalgia in the exhibition 'Past, Referenced' by Linda Hollaway and Jackie Cheetham.

Golly.

Nostalgia is also a perfume.