The film-maker David Lynch has charged no fee to the Manchester gallery hosting the biggest ever UK exhibition of his visual art and given them 100 limited-edition prints to sell to fund future projects.

HOME in Manchester hopes to raise £42,500 by selling the prints for £425 each – a quarter of the price the Blue Velvet director usually charges. Called “Four (4) Heads Came Out on Wednesday”, the monochrome, signed print was only available in person at the box office on Thursday, with all but seven snapped up at the time of publishing.

The gallery describes the picture as showing a “figurative apparition with multiple floating, circling heads, wailing upon a lonely hillside, a house of home in the rear-ground, earth and sky mingling in a brewing storm of Lynchian menace”.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest David Lynch signs one of the 100 prints. Photograph: Michael-T.-Barile

Lynch, plus his collectors, have lent 88 artworks to HOME for a free show called My Head Is Disconnected, one of the highlights of this year’s Manchester International Festival (MIF).

The weather forecast is bright for the 17-day culture fest, but Lynch’s contribution is predictably dark: amorphous figures spewing tarry ectoplasm saying: “Oh, I said a BAD thing”, a little boy apparently burning down the house of his childhood crush; and the corruption of an innocent figure called Bob, who seems a lot friendlier than his sinister Twin Peaks namesake.

“I find it very difficult to understand what is going on these days,” cries one wretched figure, bent over double, apparently on fire as they crawl along the blackened ground. Lynch painted the picture in 2009 but it feels more relevant than ever in an era of alternative facts, fake news and experts fatigue.

The show also features specially curated music events, talks and a Lynch film retrospective. The director will appear via videolink for a sold-out discussion this Saturday.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest The picture as shows a ‘figurative apparition with multiple floating, circling heads, wailing upon a lonely hillside’. Photograph: Lee Baxter

Bren O’Callaghan, HOME’s curator, travelled to Lynch’s Hollywood compound last month to finalise the show and said Lynch had been “wonderful” to deal with: “He has been very, very generous with us.” The money raised from the prints would be “incredibly” helpful to HOME, he added.

Just don’t expect any commentary from the artist to explain his often macabre images. “A common question people ask of David is: what is going on in your head? He would like to turn that on its head and ask what’s going on in your head?” said O’Callaghan. “He wants you to be a detective and work out for yourself what the art is about: he says the clues are all there.”

The festival opened on Thursday evening with a mass bell-ringing session, orchestrated from afar by Yoko Ono. Bells for Peace involves 4,000 ceramic bells, handmade and engraved for the occasion, ringing out across Manchester’s Cathedral Gardens, along with the bongs of a huge Buddhist bell and antique church bells. Like Lynch, Ono did not travel to Manchester to take part but conceived the project, which invited members of the public to bring their own bells too.

Play Video 1:26 Yoko Ono gets thousands ringing 'bells for peace' in Manchester – video report

Also premiering on Thursday night was Tree, a musical based on Mi Mandela, an album by actor and DJ Idris Elba.

Previews of the show have been overshadowed by claims from two female writers, who alleged they had been frozen out of the production after developing it for four years.

On Thursday Sarah Henley and Tori Allen-Martin announced that they had raised £12,800 in two days since going public with their grievance involving Elba and director Kwame Kwei-Armah, who are billed as the co-creators of Tree in the MIF programme.

The women started a crowdfunder after their claims went viral, in which they said they had been “bullied and silenced” and had to instruct lawyers to try (and fail) to get a credit on the production.

They said £5,000 would pay their legal bill and the rest would go towards the foundation of Burn Bright, a resource they hope will help female writers in the industry “with as little red tape around it as possible”.