PERFORMANCE artists Claire Hind and Gary Winters will sign off York charity New Visuality’s UnSeen Colours project with a display of prints of neon-lit slogans in site-specific locations at According To McGee next month.

From February 10 to 16, these "notoriously discombobulating" slogans will be exhibited at the Tower Street gallery in York alongside letterpress posters created during the project, which has been funded by Art Council England’s Grantium.

Charity director Greg McGee says: "We love neon signage and we love provocative performance art. We can’t think of another outfit who intersects those two areas so effortlessly and with such visual chutzpah as Claire Hind and Gary Winters, and we look forward to building on the success of the project later in 2018 with more neon signage."

Claire says of her residency at According To McGee with Winters: “We created a stop-motion animation film called Suspended Animation: A Foot, A Leg, A Wing, A Head from a case of taxidermy bird bits, bought from a colleague at the Freud Museum London. The bird bits are leftovers, scraps and off-cuts from a previous art installations at the Whitechapel Gallery, and we imagined a space for such remains as living, animated, free.

"We offered an open-studio opportunity for anyone to pop by and witness the process of the film being made and have a go at making a scenario from the bird bits. Participants were excited and found the experience extremely humorous, particularly as they were invited to put their ideas forward for animation. We're now in the process of editing the film, shot on Super 8mm, which will be available to view in the spring."

UnSeen Colours is a celebration of independent art, and alongside Hind and Winters' installations and performances, the project has exhibited disciplines ranging from Letterpress posters to collages and digital designs.

One contributor has been light installation artist Nick Walters, who says: "The funding from Arts Council England has been a real boost because it makes what was an exciting conversation over beer become reality. The will is there and the volunteers are there, but ambitious plans need financial support. The grant has ensured we could deliver the installation with the top level of quality it deserved and reach quite a massive audience."

Greg McGee agrees. "York is ideally suited for displays of innovation. The intersection of the traditional and technological in a city like York ensures that projects like UnSeen Colours make bigger ripples than in other cities."

Unseen Colours has enjoyed considerable audience participation via Walters' interactive light projections, attracting heavy footfall to five weeks of exhibition at According To McGee.

McGee is confident that such happenings will retain their momentum. "There’s a new hunger and awareness to play around and we have some world class practitioners," he says. "Mediale in York in September/October is going to rewrite what a festival of media arts can do. The legacy of that promises to be pretty amazing, so really the only thing to do is step up and join in."