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).
installation
Sab-bed Bloody Sab-bed /
A full-scale marble rendering of the bed from the front cover of Black Sabbath’s ‘Sabbath Bloody Sabbath’ album cover.
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.
Welcome to Wherever This Is... /
An American-style town “Welcome to…” sign, set out in a random landscape, that says…
“Welcome to wherever this is…”
Collaborative Azulejo /
A massive, public, collaborative, azulejo.
An azulejo is a large, tiled, painting (usually blue on white), found primarily in Portugal.
Azulejos often depict biblical, mythological, or historical scenes.
This would be a public mural of-sorts, tiled onto the side of a large building with an open invitation for community members to come and add a bit from their own experience/life/perspective.
Desert Head /
A single-channel video of a head poking out of the sand in a desert landscape, the eyes are closed, framed in such a way as we can’t tell if it’s someone buried up to their neck or whether it’s a decapitated head.
The eyes dart open and we hear the head’s internal monologue, worrying over trivial and mundane aspects of everyday life - “Did I leave the gas on?!…”
At the end of the monologue the eyes close again.
My ideal ‘head’ would be the actor Paul Putner.
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.
Augmented Gubb /
Develop an augmented reality app that means I could drop a public artwork into anywhere in the world and, so long as someone has the app on their phone, they can view the artwork.
The possibilities are, literally, endless.
Wal Goch /
A wall made entirely from old house-bricks found in the River Taff.
Margate t-shirts /
A series of printed t-shirts that reference the key businesses of my Margate youth (most of which aren’t there anymore), in the way people covet vintage stores selling old American utility workers shirts etc:
Brandybucks, Martell Press, The Kent Hotel, Pisces, The Cottage, Franks, Thorleys, Club Caprice, The Golden Curry, The Ship Inn, The Nayland Rock, Baba Kebabs, The Badge Shop…
Champagne /
A multi-screen video (wide-screen monitors, installed portrait, to create a tall tower of screens).
On the top screen is a full-frame shot of a flute of champagne standing on a tray. The tray wobbles, causing the flute to fall from the tray.
In slow motion, the flute falls towards the floor, moving from one screen to the next, until we see the glass smash on the floor.
Once it has come to rest, the audio of a room full of people cheering plays.
The end.
My Empire of Dirt /
A two part project/sculpture/installation, existing concurrently.
One part involves the purchase of a standard single burial plot in a cemetery. The plot is then dug, as if ready to receive a burial.
In the other part, the earth removed from that burial plot is exhibited as a mound in a room/gallery somewhere else (logically, within the same city/town).
Both spaces can be visited by the public.
Memory Tree /
An adolescent tree sapling planted as a communal public artwork, where local residents are invited to come and tie or chain items of sentimental value to it.
As the tree grows, the items will slowly become consumed by the expanding tree and become part of its fabric, forever. A living time-capsule.
Little Echo /
An architectural/housing development of a handful of Spanish-style bungalows/shotgun shacks set around a small body of water with a water-feature based on the hi-jets in Echo Park Lake, Los Angeles.
The artwork is the endeavour of building the bungalows and doing the landscaping, but once they exist they can be run as residency live/work studios and low-cost housing for artists.
Blackboards /
Fill a room/gallery with blackboards, so it looks a bit like an exhibition of Joseph Beuys blackboards from his lectures, but the diagrams on the blackboards are copies of blackboards from scenes in films, such as when Lieutenant Harris is writing on a blackboard in front of the new recruits in the first Police Academy movie.
Luck Favours the Brave /
A single channel video/projection of a multi-multi-split-screen image containing film of matadors being gored by bulls.
Hiraeth /
A digital screen/monitor attached to a computer showing every tweet, in real time, that contains the word or hashtag ‘hiraeth’ in it.
Hiraeth is Welsh word meaning a deep longing for something, particularly one’s home.
Often described as an untranslatable word, as there is no direct translation in English, I’ve just translated it for you.
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.
All in This Together print/sculpture /
The phrase ‘All in this together’ written in the style of the ‘Arbeit Macht Frei’ gate outside of Auschwitz, rendered as a print or sculpture.
‘We’re all in this together’ become the catchphrase and persistent lie of the Tory party from 2008 onwards to justify the crippling programme of austerity they unleashed upon the UK.