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).
site-specific
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.
Four Branches /
A series of medium-format photographs of sites, now, from The Four Branches of the Mabinogion (Welsh Folklore).
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.
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…
Dreamytime Escorts /
A written agreement/contract to visit someone in their dreams and take them on an adventure.
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.
Battle Jacket Fiction /
A ‘battle jacket’ (cut-off denim jacket covered in band patches worn by heavy metal fans) covered in patches of fictional heavy metal bands.
Walk on the Wild Side /
A performance, that becomes a video, of the drummer from a Mötley Crüe tribute act riding on The Scenic Railway at Margate’s ‘Dreamland’ funfair, with their drum-kit strapped onto the ride, playing along to Mötley Crüe’s song, ‘Wild Side’.
The original video for the song famously features Tommy Lee playing his drum-kit in a hydraulic, revolving, cage.
As a former resident of Margate, employee at Dreamland, and (then) aspiring rock star, this work also contains autobiographical meaning.
Topiary of Doom /
A long-term project, whereby a bush appropriate for topiary is planted. As the bush grows, it is trimmed to form the shape of a nuclear mushroom cloud.
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).
Evil Portal /
A huge holographic installation in a desert somewhere.
This is based on (essentially a recreation of) a scene from the film ‘Time Bandits’.
In one scene of the film, the Time Bandits find themselves in a desert and come across an invisible barrier they can’t pass through. They start arguing and one of them picks up a nearby skull from a deceased animal (maybe human, I need to check) and throws it at the person they’re arguing with.
The skull misses the person and smashes through the invisible barrier, shattering it like a massive piece of glass, and making a huge hole in it, which reveals The Fortress of Ultimate Darkness (a scary castle) behind.
This sculpture/installation would be a massive glass hologram in the desert, in the shape of a huge broken sheet of glass, with an image of a scary fortress/castle in it.
Ghost Room /
Using air-conditioning units connected to a weather-app via a computer, the room/gallery will be kept at the local (and live) temperature of Williamsburg in New York.
When I came up with this idea I immediately thought it should be Williamsburg, for no more conscious reason than it’s somewhere I would often like to be, but aren’t.
I’ve since come to think of how Williamsburg has been described as cool, as hot, and for many people is now something of a cultural ghost town, due to gentrification.
It would be possible to come up for a conceptual justification for setting the temperature to pretty much any town or city in the world.
A key recommendation is that wherever the work is installed, a town/city is chosen somewhere in the world that has a significantly different temperature/season/weather-pattern, to ensure the work is physically effective on entering the room.
Nike Air Bathroom /
This is a sculpture that consists of a pair of large Nike Air trainers nailed to the wall (the soles of the shoes flat on the wall, the shoe facing ‘up’ the wall, with the nail going through the toes).
The two trainers are positioned either side of a ceramic urinal divider, of the kind you find in men’s public bathrooms to divide the space between the urinals.
Positioned inside each trainer is a single urinal-cake (the perfumed cleaning blocks that are placed in urinals).
The sculpture should be positioned on the wall at urinal height.
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.