Reference: FRANKLIN005
Title: We All Make the Games
Date: Unknown
Author: Luke Franklin (filmmaker), Eoin McLoughlin, (filmmaker) and Phoebe Matheson (producer)
Details: MoxiePictures for McDonalds
Media: Film
Credit: moxiepictures.com/mcdonalds-we-all-make-the-games

Description: Charged with capturing the spirit of the games, my crew and I had to travel the length and breadth of the country shooting Opening Ceremonies fireworks, village fetes, bike races and face painters. Shooting quickly and editing on the fly. Footage from Monday and Tuesday would be on air on Wednesday and so on, meeting rolling deadlines throughout the 3 weeks of the games. We shot like mad and gave away something like 9,000 Big Macs vouchers to persuade 1,000 members of the public to sign up seeing themselves on air just days later.

Reference: FRANKLIN001
Title: I Need Some Advice...
Date: 2013
Author: Luke Franklin and Liz Hainsworth
Details: A project in/with response to the British Library, London.
Media: Textiles
Credit: Courtesy of the artist

Description: Liz Hainsworth and I were interested in the informal knowledge that was walking straight through the door each day. We ran drop-ins over several days, grabbing titbits of information from some and soul bearing with others. Then we had the distillate of those conversations embroidered onto patches and made into a quilt – an incredibly comforting and informal object that exists in a world of folk-wisdom.

Reference: FRANKLIN002
Title: I Need Some Advice... [Patches]
Date: 2013
Author: Luke Franklin and Liz Hainsworth
Details: Embroidered patches from the quilt
Media: Quilt Patches
Credit: Courtesy of the artist

Description: Liz Hainsworth and I were interested in the informal knowledge that was walking straight through the door each day. We ran drop-ins over several days, grabbing titbits of information from some and soul bearing with others. Then we had the distillate of those conversations embroidered onto patches and made into a quilt – an incredibly comforting and informal object that exists in a world of folk-wisdom.

Reference: FRANKLIN003
Title: I Need Some Advice... [Workshop]
Date: 2013
Author: Luke Franklin and Liz Hainsworth
Details: British Library Workshop
Media: Photograph
Credit: Courtesy of the artist

Description: Liz Hainsworth and I were interested in the informal knowledge that was walking straight through the door each day. We ran drop-ins over several days, grabbing titbits of information from some and soul bearing with others. Then we had the distillate of those conversations embroidered onto patches and made into a quilt – an incredibly comforting and informal object that exists in a world of folk-wisdom.

Reference: FRANKLIN004
Title: 72 Unused Right Shoes
Date: Unknown
Author: Luke Franklin
Details: Photography Series and Installation
Media: Photographs
Credit: Courtesy of the artist

Description: 72 Unused Right Shoes is a project that came about by pure chance. Sharon Woolridge had her leg removed after a tumour was found in her hip as a result of chemotherapy she had had ten years previously. As Sharon’s amputation was not an accident, she was in the strange situation of knowing exactly when it was going to happen. On her last day with two legs, she headed out, bought the biggest pair of wedge heels she could find and went dancing. Since then she has kept every single, un-needed, right shoe. 72 so far. What I see in Sharon isn’t a story of triumph over adversity but a life of colour and vibrancy regardless of that adversity. She is one of my heroes and those 72 unused right shoes make me smile every time I think about them.

Reference: FRANKLIN007
Title: Changing Contexts
Date: 2021
Author: Luke Franklin
Details: Found signage
Media: Photograph
Credit: Courtesy of the artist.

Description: I’m sure they meant the cabinet the sign was attached to, but I stole the sign. It’s in a frame on my wall, looking at me as I type this. Changing contexts, crashing disparate elements together or just interrupting a well-worn narrative can all be interesting ways to create new meanings.

Reference: FRANKLIN013
Title: The Hardest Working Van in Show Business
Date: 2021
Author: Luke Franklin
Details: Toyota HiAce Van, 2005, L4830mm x W1690mm x H1930mm
Media: Photographs
Credit: Courtesy of the artist.

Description: Whenever someone asks what my medium is, I usually shout at them. I get a gang of lads, get a van, put a load of gear in the back and then go do something stupid. Mike’s HiAce is usually that van.

In Ireland, a HiAce is a “knacker wagon”. Drive it for a couple of days and someone will try by weed off you. Or sell you some. I want to dig into these two personas by exploring the van’s cultural identities that live in song, photography, and reputation to see if there is a way to puncture and reconcile those warring ideas.

Why does Irish folk king, Christy Moore, punk legends Paranoid Visions and Finnish death metal band, Cannibal Accident, all immortalise the van in song? Can a work-horse shit-box be an artwork in a white-box? Or will it always just be a novelty?

This is Mike’s van, there are many like it but this one is Mike’s.

Reference: FRANKLIN008
Title: The Story of Art
Date: 1950
Author: E.H. Gombrich
Details: A survey of the history of art from ancient times to the modern era.
Media: Publication
Credit: wikipedia.org/The_Story_of_Art

Description: The best art history text-book/explainer out there. If I could put it on the secondary school curriculum I would. No esoteric language, no art-waffle and a better plot than Line of Duty.

Reference: FRANKLIN009
Title: Panda's Puzzle, and His Voyage of Discovery
Date: 1977
Author: Michael Foreman
Details: A story of identity and belonging told through the eyes of a panda.
Media: Publication
Credit: books.google.co.uk/Pandas_Puzzle_and_His_Voyage_of_Discovery

Description: Panda travels all around the world trying to find out whether he is a "white bear with black bits or a black bear with white bits?"

Reference: FRANKLIN010
Title: Alcoholics Anonymous [The Big Book]
Date: 1939
Author: William G.
Details: The Story of How More Than One Hundred Men Have Recovered from Alcoholism.
Media: Publication
Credit: wikipedia.org/The_Big_Book

Description: I've been in and out of 12 Step recovery for over 10 years now and it's definitely kept me alive more than a few times. The things I've made are often about challenging audiences to take part, about things being open and free to all, about everyone having a story, about folk-knowledge and oral traditions. Ideas that run strong in 12 Step circles.

Reference: FRANKLIN011
Title: Shelters, Shacks, and Shanties
Date: 1914
Author: Daniel Carter Beard
Details: Written by one of the founders of the Boy Scouts movement in America, the book explains how to build shelters, from the simplest requiring a hatchet, to elaborate constructions such as a homestead.
Media: Publication
Credit: wikipedia.org/Daniel_Carter_Beard

Description: One of the original sources for my Nova work, 4 Bothies but mainly a source for the idea that if it's hard enough to get to and hard enough to find "even an errant cattle rustler will respect the absent owner, sweep the floor, close the door and leave everything in 'apple-pie' order"

Reference: FRANKLIN012
Title: Bungalow Bliss
Date: 1971
Author: Jack Fitzsimons
Details: Explaining the detail of all aspects of building a bungalow, from planning laws to how to put in a septic tank.
Media: Publication
Credit: wikipedia.org/Jack_Fitzsimons

Description: Arguably the most important book in Irish history and thick with no-nonsense plans of 1, 2 and 3 bed bungalows were sold in newsagents, petrol stations, bookshops and builders' providers. Often derided and paraphrased as Bungalow Blight or Bungalow Blitz by the end of the 70's,10,000 houses a year were being built from the book in Ireland and Jack Fitzmaurice single handedly changed the landscape and lives of rural Ireland.

Reference: FRANKLIN016
Title: What Remains
Date: 2019
Author: Michael John Hunter
Details: Hunter specialises in sculpture and photography, creating enormous hyper-realistic and highly detailed replicas of children’s toys and insects and installing these in real-life locations. The sculptures are photographed at night, from a certain height and angle and using a specific focus technique which ‘fakes macro photography’. The resulting works explore how imagery can manipulate how we view our world.
Media: Sculpture
Credit: michaeljohnhunter.com

Description: I have a pal who’s an art photographer. He makes enormous models of tiny things like dead flies, Barbies, army men or model aeroplanes. He sticks it in a van and in the dead of the night, drives out to some deserted industrial estate on the outskirts of London.

There, he’ll setup the fly on its back, legs folded up and stiff like it’s died on your windowsill; or that Barbie, face down and hair askew like it’s thrown down by an angry toddler. He takes photos of them using a bellows camera with a tilt-shift lens to make them look tiny again.

They’re incredible.

Reference: FRANKLIN014
Title: Birth of Venus
Date: 1485
Author: Sandro Botticelli
Details: The composition shows the goddess of love and beauty arriving on land, on the island of Cyprus.
Media: Painting
Credit: wikipedia.org/The_Birth_of_Venus

Description: When I was 15 or 16, I got to go on an art trip to Florence and to the Uffizi Gallery. After a few rooms of flat alter pieces, I came across a giant ginger chick on a clam. It blew my mind. What had been a postage-stamp sized thumbnail in my art history textbook was the size of a billboard and had been painted by hand, by one dude, in the fifteenth century. That painting had exalted me. That was when I understood the power of art. While questioning, critical and interrogative work absolutely has its place, I want to make art that has a positive and if possible, exalting effect on my audience.