Ongoing collection of designs about James Sadler.
ARTIST STATEMENT
This collaboration is a celebration of innovation, creativity, and courage; of the bold, the brave, and the beautifully baffling. It is an exploration of maverick thinking and the restless spirit that drives progress, even when it defies logic, convention, or approval.
Creatively led by BOBO1325, the multi award-winning design studio founded by Beth Travers, the work is rooted in social consciousness and shaped by the world as it is experienced. Complex, chaotic, and rich with contradiction. Each collection acts as an open invitation into an internal landscape: provocative, layered, and unapologetically eccentric. Symbolism weaves throughout, encouraging curiosity and rewarding those willing to look closer – designs that donât simply sit still, but ask to be discovered, questioned, and felt.
Supported by Material Source and NOMA, this year-long project marks ten years of Sadlerâs Yard and honours the legacy of James Sadler, a pioneer whose contributions to science and engineering continue to echo, despite his near-erasure from mainstream historical record. A figure defined by courage, experimentation, and a touch of avant-garde absurdity, Sadler exists somewhere between documented fact and mythologised memory.
Within the body of work, Sadler appears fragmented, rendered in broken lines and shifting forms. This visual language reflects both the gaps in his story and the instability of historical narrative itself. What remains is incomplete, contested, and at times unreliable; a patchwork of folklore, embellishment, and partial truths. It raises a question: was Sadler overlooked not for lack of impact, but for lack of status just another casualty of the divide between âtown and gownâ?
Yet this is Manchester – a place that thrives on doing things differently. This collaboration reclaims Sadlerâs story, celebrating a forgotten pioneer and reimagining his historic balloon flight from Balloon Street as both a moment of invention and an enduring symbol of fearless imagination.