The Black Flag (band) logo recreated by pinning four black bin-liners to the wall. Ideally, those bin-liners will have been bought from a hardware store in Hermosa Beach, California (where the band originates from).
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Spike /
A public sculpture which is a massive rendering of those plastic bird spikes that people put on window ledges and security cameras to prevent birds from landing. The scale of this sculpture will mean it is the perfect size for birds to use it as a perch.
Libraries Gave Us Power /
A collaborative photographic project documenting the, over-800, libraries that have closed in the UK since 2010 (under this Tory government). I will publish a list of the libraries and their, defunct, addresses, with an invitation for anyone/everyone to photograph the buildings or sites and share them with me as part of the project, as a fully credited collaborator. These images could be a series of zines, a book, a video, an exhibition, or all of them.
Collaborative Print Portofolios /
A series of portfolios made up of an identical selection of my prints from across the years. These will be shared with a series of collaborators, who will add to the prints in their own unique way - me + 1 other artist per portfolio. A kind-of Basquiat/Warhol scenario. The portfolios will then be offered for sale as full collaborations.
Marble Foot /
A marble sculpture of one of my feet, attached to a marble base - as if a fragment from a larger sculpture.
Include this work in every exhibition/project/installation I ever have, with an invitation for visitors to touch the foot to bring them good luck.
Over time this repetitive action will begin to polish and wear-away the marble, as we see with sculptures around the world purported to contain good luck.
Origami Extreme /
Take a sheet of any size screw-up-able material and screw it up into a ball.
Take a photo.
Flatten it out again and trace over every fold and crease line with a fine-liner pen.
The reference photo and the lines on the piece of paper then exist as some sort of extreme (impossible?) origami proposition.
Wal Goch /
A wall made entirely from old house-bricks found in the River Taff.
Dreamytime Escorts /
A written agreement/contract to visit someone in their dreams and take them on an adventure.
Knuckleball /
Learn how to throw a knuckleball, as referred to in baseball.
“A knuckleball or knuckler is a baseball pitch thrown to minimise the spin of the ball in flight, causing an erratic, unpredictable motion.”
Burning Guitar /
An electric guitar, on a stand, plugged into an amplifier, feeding back, doused in a flammable liquid and set on fire.
This could be a performance that later becomes a video, sound work, and/or photograph.
Raining Blood /
This could either be a live performance or a video (possibly both).
At Bluestone holiday resort in Wales, they have a swimming pool with a wave machine and large water jets/fountains that spray out in an arc into the pool from a raised platform above the wave-pool.
This performance/filming would happen at night, as lighting is key to its mood.
The pool will start off in low-light-to-darkness.
A soundtrack of Slayer’s ‘Raining Blood’ will play, loud, through the room.
As the track plays, white lights will flash to animate the opening drumbeats of the song.
As the opening riff of the track plays, people dressed in the clothes of heavy metal fans begin to gather on the raised platform (they’re wearing jeans, boots, band t-shirts, cut-off denim jackets with patches).
As the song fully kicks in with Tom Araya’s high pitched scream, the fountains begin spraying into the pool, lit only by red light, and the people amassed on platform begin diving off the platform into the pool, as if stage-diving at a concert.
This continues for 3m25s of the song, until it ends with a huge clap of thunder and the sound of rain.
At this point, the stage-diving stops and the red light changes to white light on the fountains for the remainder of the track (which consists of audio of thunder and rain).
Cultural Icon Fire /
This could be a performance, an action, a video, a photograph, or all of them.
Using a flammable liquid or gel, a large pentagram (for example) is drawn on the floor, after dark. This is then set alight.
I have also imagined this as a potential series of ‘round iconography’ burns i.e. do the same with an anarchy symbol, C.N.D., a smiley etc.
A Repeatable Action-Work /
Every artist needs a simple action-work that they can do anywhere, anytime (for example, on arrival somewhere), which transforms a fairly modest moment into a moment of creativity, capturing something of that moment and lending it significance (even if it doesn’t really have any).
Something like:
Balling/screwing-up a blank piece of A4 paper, then photographing it in-situ.
Keeping the disposable cup from the first cup of coffee you drink in a new destination.
Sending a postcard to your dead Grandmother’s last address.
In some ways, it doesn’t really matter what the action is, it’s just a physical representation of a moment. The success of a work like this exists in the repetition. One balled-up and photographed piece of A4 is photograph of a piece of trash, whereas 100 photographs of balled-up pieces of A4 in different locations becomes a marker of time.