Generic Greeting Collective – It’s Your Town

Fionnula Hainey | 5th November 2015

tumblr_nvszzxOyiE1qezxilo1_500Together, New Amsterdam Vodka and Generic Greeting have embraced the spirit of Manchester…#ItsYourTown.

How did you get yourselves involved in the #ItsYourTown project with New Amsterdam Vodka? 

Generic Greeting is a rambling family of illustrators, designers, musicians, writers and poets. A mix of great creatives, we sprawl across mainly Manchester with a few straying further and we all work together and remotely on lots of incredible live projects that can see us printing at festivals, painting massive murals at skate parks or creating cassettes to promote the music makers within us.

The New Amsterdam Vodka team spotted some of our work and approached us to work with them on a zine that celebrated the fine city we live in.  They offered us creative freedom and so we immediately jumped at the opportunity.

The zine looks great, did you have fun creating it? 

As mentioned there are a lot of us in the collective and the creation of the zine was a mix of physically working in the studio together and getting input from others working remotely through different mediums. This is what makes working as a collective so interesting.

We communicate in different manners with usually one person sailing the Generic Greeting ship and helping to guide us, while letting us pour out the working of our minds.

The zine came together quite naturally with a lot of hard work behind the scenes. Lots of ideas and works-in-progress are thrown around and it’s always awesome to finally see it all come together.

Is a lot of your other work inspired by the city, if so how? 

Several us seem to have an obsession with Manchester, its buildings and the amazing folk who reside here. You can see from the New Amsterdam Vodka ‘It’s Your Town’ zine that stories are constantly being created from overheard words and characters we see.

I personally have been building a map of MCR #mapmymcr which is a combination of illustrated buildings suggested by people on Twitter/Instagram and stories of when I have been there. We Are Empire are helping build the site with me and several exhibitions are on the way.  I also created the ‘Key To Your Town’ map for this zine.  The significance of the map is not just to guide you around the city, it’s to navigate its stories, people and places… it’s not a map to follow its a map that tells you to go on an adventure and find your own way.

Will Berry, one of the founders of the collective, is another lover of Manchester’s architecture which you can see adorning the walls of Spaceport, 2022NQ, Joshua Brooks and more – I love seeing the externals of building on the internal.

Lulu Heal, another member, illustrates these amazing warped characters from the streets, the details are in depth and it makes me think of those slightly blurred Friday eves on Oldham St. Come experience it yourself and you will see what I mean…

Can you tell us more about the mural you’ll be illustrating at the live launch event?

In a typical GG manner there are several of us teaming up to work collectively on the New Amsterdam Vodka mural. It’s a celebration of several cities and will be a mix of our styles combining into one large image. You may have guessed there will be architecture and a whole host of other illustrated goodness….

What other projects have you got coming up?

We’re about to launch our biggest exhibition to date – ‘Homecoming’ at Hereford College Of Arts, one of the few remaining creative colleges in the country. We’re also working on the next installment in our Food Zine series, planning our 5th birthday celebrations as well as running our mix series and ploughing on with all our own freelance work.

Generic Greeting Collective is working with New Amsterdam to launch Project It’s Your Town, a campaign which calls on the public to celebrate and share their stories, top tips and must visits for their area via #ItsYourTown.  Visit facebook.com/NewAmsterdamUK for more info or to read the full zine.