Liverpool Art Prize winner David Jacques is launching two major projects today. He talks to Laura Davis
THE year was 1979. Margaret Thatcher was just entering 10 Downing Street and David Jacques was leaving school.
His ambitions were realistic – he did not expect to get a job.
Instead, like many young people facing unemployment in post-industrial Liverpool, he found a way of expressing his frustration.
“I was like anyone of my generation who was leaving a comprehensive school with really nothing in the way of expectations. It was a political awakening,” he says, now ensconced in a city centre studio perfumed with solvent.
“I was the same as any kid who picked up a guitar or started writing.
“Initially you do it quite privately and work up to find your voice, then you communicate what you’ve developed – you’d join a band and gig, you’d write and try to publish.
“I painted and exhibited.”
Inspired by the work of Mexican mural artist Diego Rivera – whose creations were “essentially a people’s history” – he enrolled on an HND in mural design at the Chelsea School of Art where he studied from 1984-86.
It was there that he discovered Robert Tressell’s book The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists, the basis for his new work, The Great Money Trick 2011 – a 23m-long piece that will be unveiled on the side of a city centre building today as part of Liverpool’s City of Radicals season.
Born in Dublin in 1870, Tressell was a housepainter and sign writer who intended to make a brief stay in Liverpool on his way to catch a ship to Canada in 1911. Instead, he died here in the Royal Infirmary Workhouse and was buried in a paupers’ grave.
The City of Radicals programme includes a re-creation of his funeral at lunchtime tomorrow, with around 100 guests – presumably many more than attended the original event: “If you’re interested in Socialist politics, it is almost regulation that you pick it up,” says Jacques of The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists.
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