Strike! exhibition

I have a couple of pieces in an exhibition of illustration from the radical political mag Strike! Here's a crap picture of one of my pieces (on the right of the photo) sharing a wall with Ralph Steadman (on the left). 

The exhibition has been put on to celebrate Strike!'s first year of publication, and there's some really good stuff in it, from well known artists such as Steadman and Stanley Donwood, and lesser known talents. 

One of the things that I like most about Strike!, and which sets it apart from other grassroots political publications, is that it's beautifully designed, with top notch illustration.

You can check it all out until 8th Feb 2014 at the amazingly named Flaxon Ptooch. As walk as a gallery, it's a hairdressing salon, so you may have to work around some 'do's being done, or you could get a cool chop yourself!

My illustration in the picture above is from David Graeber's article 'Bullshit Jobs', originally published in the Summer 2013 issue of Strike! and then online, where it became a bit of a viral phenomenon. http://www.strikemag.org/bullshit-jobs/

Art, Science, Bacon

I was asked to design the poster for an art exhibition at the Science Museum in London.

The exhibition was a chance for staff at the museum to show off their creative pursuits. I work part-time at the museum and, as a friend of mine pointed out to me, most staff have their own 'slash', as in Exhibition Facilitator / Illustrator or Front of House / Designer.

The exhibition featured all sorts of artsy goings-ons, taking in fashion design, painting, comics, fiction and music, and it was fantastic to find out what my various colleagues get up to in their non-museum hours.

I rather stupidly forgot to take any photos, but here's the poster.

That's Francis Bacon lurking in the bottom right outside the museum. As it happens the next week I went to Dublin and saw his studio, recreated in all its chaotic glory at the Hugh Lane Gallery.
I feel a little bit torn about this. On the one hand they've made Frankie's studio into a really interesting exhibit. On the other hand, I can't help but feel that the act of minutely reassembling an environment that was a testament to bloody minded chaos is supremely missing the point!

Anyway, when I fancifully put Francis in the picture, I hadn't realised that his studio was in fact around the corner from the Science Museum in Reece Mews, South Kensington.

O to be in Beijing!

I am exhibiting four pictures at the O Gallery at Ogilvy Beijing.

This is part of the Image Makers exhibition, all helmed by the amazing Fei Wang, leader of the Flotian collective, mainly but not exclusively made up of artists from my Illustration MA at Camberwell. I'm very happy to be on show in such great company.

I wish I could go see the exhibition in person, it looks suitably swanky. Check out the chandelier!

IF YOU DON'T WANT TO KNOW THE SCORE...

...THEN LOOK AWAY NOW!
***If you are an artist working on this project who hasn't completed their entry yet then read no further.***

I have a piece in John Miers' mind-boggling Comica exhibition, Score and Script. It's on at The Centre for Recent Drawing in Highbury (down the road next to the Tube where cars emerge from and try to run you over), London until 15 December. More deets on location etc here http://www.c4rd.org.uk/C4RD/Current_Exhibition.html

30ish comics artists have responded to John's ingenious research project on the language of comics, all part of his PhD research. John drew his own one-page comic and then came up with two ways of abstracting it, 1) a minimal 'script' and 2) a terrifying 'score' that looked like this!

I agreed to interpret the score foe my entry! Each of the red boxes is an 'actor', not necessarily a sentient character but an object that in some way has an impact on the progress of the story. The blue lines show the centre of gravity or direction of movement of each 'actor'. 

I wrestled long and hard with this fiendish system...

...and eventually came up with the below. There are still some artists who are working on John's project , and as the whole point is for the results to be untempered by cross-contamination, we're not supposed to be projecting our artwork onto skyscrapers, but I hope he won't mind if I show it here.

It lives!

I have created a monster, and here it is, on the floor of my living room.

This is my MA project, Capital City, a graphic poem about The City and the financial crisis. It's even more fun than it sounds.

If you want to see more of this kind of madness then come along to our MA Illustration final exhibition at Camberwell College of Arts from Thursday 6th September to Thursday 13th September. Here's the invite and our group website at http://www.camberwellillustration.co.uk/