The State We’re In - Profit and Self

This was a nationwide billboard project commissioned by The Gallery and The Artichoke Trust. Artworks from 11 artists were exhibited as posters and billboards (paper and digital) through thousands of sites across the UK, responding to the title ‘The State We’re In’.

There was a nice little article in The Guardian and then they followed up with a printed insert covering all the artists and artworks, which you can download HERE.

My own work emerged from an ongoing series of text posters, and sparked some interesting conversations. For a start, the rail networks (who were exhibiting the posters on their trains) refused to take my work (I wonder why?..) and I received a lovely email from a vicar who had seen The Guardian supplement and felt inspired to write a sermon around my thinking.

I think it’s pretty obvious what the work is saying. And from a visual point of view I was interested in where the colouring would start to break down and, potentially, obscure this massive and very clear message, but if you want more, this is the text I wrote for the commissioner…

“Our society and culture increasingly values economic profit and personal advancement above all else; an individualistic and capitalist-driven world-view, that can only lead to division and catastrophe. It is no-longer conjecture that businesses conspire to make profit from activities long-since known to be toxic to the world. ‘Profit and self above all else’, on one level, acts as a critical observation of this problem. It could also be taken as a mantra for the American Psycho generation, reading as something of an objectivist tenet. We live in a time of real-life Bond villains; super-rich, super-powerful, individuals, living on private islands with enough personal wealth to end all the world’s inequalities, but waking up every day and choosing not to. If that’s not a contemporary equivalent of holding the world to ransom, I’m unsure what is.”

(All images thanks to Chris Payne, Yves Salmon, The Gallery/Artichoke)