David Shrigley offers art therapy to Manchester

How Are You Feeling? will have a live and interactive bent, offering performance as well the artist’s more recognisable media – drawing, painting and sculpture.

The show’s title, associated with self-help, psychiatry and the diagnosis of psychosis, is a reference to the art-therapy which Shrigley is offering visitors, as a mechanism to cope with what he sees as ‘an increasingly crazy and poorly signposted world’.

At set intervals over the course of the exhibition’s four-month tenure at The Cornerhouse, Shrigley will direct local actors in a series of performance-based and often participatory works.

Other scheduled pieces include a show and tell tour by Shrigley himself on 13 October, and, in a typically surreal twist, a tour led by TV comedian Harry Hill on 1 December.

 In a confusing but entertaining statement, Shrigley says, ‘I may destroy parts of the building and rebuild them in an interesting way. I will bring all my skills to the task; I may also use witchcraft.

‘I feel a strong bond with the people from Manchester – I may have lived here in a former life. I think the people of Manchester are very exotic and interesting and I am excited to be amongst them.’

In the 12 days preceding the exhibition, Shrigley will host a residency where he will create new works in response to Cornerhouse gallery spaces.

How Are You Feeling? runs from 6 October-6 January at The Cornerhouse Manchester, 70 Oxford Street, Manchester, M1 5NH