Recent work

Printing onto an estate agents board found on the street. I was so pleased when I found it as it fits nicely with my work on Monopoly. I wasn’t bothered it looked weathered as I feel this adds to the aesthetic and reflects my ideas around property speculation and gentrification. I used screen printing to add text to it. I chose the word flip because of its association with flipping property and to flip the monopoly board in anger, to abruptly end a game

I’ve printed this yellow on red with a view to pasting it up on the derelict sight that inspired my work. I wanted it to be eye catching to the public, so they will read it and ask questions.

When the inspiration becomes part of the physical work

Ideas

Taking local news articles and printing on top.

Using photoshop text. Idea for blowing up work large A1 digital print.

Printing onto found paper. A map of an affluent area in Bristol.

This article kick started my interest in the problem with property speculation. This is local to me and an eye sore, there is a massive issue with affordable housing everywhere at the moment and buildings are brought up and not maintained. Developers holding onto them to maximise profits.

Development

Gestural marks colours based around monopoly board/money

Printing on to acetate. Phrase from article on the monopoly game. Layered onto painted background.

Screen print and spray paint. Phrase taken from an article about designing board games and applying same strategy to business management.

Mixed media piece is it finished?

Layering in photoshop Monopoly money and mixed media piece with text.

Ideas/Development

Playing with this phrase as it means to angrily end a game of monopoly. Also flip property connotations.

Found some reclaimed hard board and painted the background blue a colour from monopoly. Experimenting with screen print and gold ink. Gold to suggest wealth.

Drawing monopoly title deed cards.

Screen-print and spray paint

Mixed media large work in progress. Using colours based on monopoly.

Ideas/development

Acrylic and stencil, cutting out letters. Quote from online forum discussing the game monopoly.

Texture, mixed media background. Idea for printing onto.

More letterpress printing. Ideas around game playing allowing the viewer to decide their own meaning.

Working on a text I found in an article about play therapy. The play is monotonous and routine for the therapist but not for the child, who needs the reassurance of the routine and repetitiveness. I stencilled the text onto coloured paper like fly posters. I then read an article in the local press about the outcome of a domestic violence case involving a local football manager. I found the story to be the same outcome. The alleged victim a woman retracting her statement. The text I have been working on seemed to fit with the article and my feelings about it. The bottom picture is the fly poster in the local environment. A busy section of cycle path on the route into Bath.

Ideas/development

Stencil on acrylic, quote from article about playing. Again it’s up to the reader to decide the meaning of players.

Experimenting with acrylic and spray paint to get that street art/graffiti vibe

Acrylic, spray paint and stencil. Whatever I can get away with. Playing with letter placement to make the viewer wait for text meaning gratification!

Playing with textured paint background and clean letterpress on top. Quote from article about winning the board game monopoly.

Ideas/Inspiration

Monopoly money

I was doing some online research about play and playing games. I found a really interesting article on ft.com about the transformative power of board games. There was an interesting line about tracing social change through the games that people play. One of the games it gave an example of is Monopoly. Now I was really interested as my mind was already thinking about Monopoly and making work around it. I was fascinated to read it was invented by a woman in 1903. Elizabeth Magie came up with a game she called “The Landlord’s Game” which criticised the concentration of land in private monopolies. However she was not initially recognised as the creator of the game, that credit went to a man called Charles Darrow , who was taught to play “The Landlords Game” by friends. Back in those days Magie’s hand drawn board game was passed around by friends . Despite Magie patenting the game, it appears Darrow tweaked his version enough and Darrow would later sell his version of the game to Parker Brothers. Anyway it is well worth reading up on this fascinating story and this has only fuelled my Monopoly interest more. Here is some work based on text taken from articles online about Monopoly and the act of playing Monopoly.

Stencil on acrylic. Taking a phrase from an article on Monopoly. Using a textured messy background and stencil as inspired by street art and Christopher Wool a text based artist.

This is one of my favourite pieces. I had the idea of working on other materials and newspapers seemed to be a good idea. I found this quote about playing Monopoly and it just fitted with the article. An idea was born, what other articles could I find that would fit with taking Monopoly quotes out of context? I wasn’t really thinking about the colours I used I was just using colours I liked. So maybe I needed to give this more consideration too.

Textured background with stencil. Quote about Monopoly but I wanted to make it difficult to read so I played around with the letter placement and chopped off a word at the end. Maybe it’s a step too far as I asked my course mates what they thought and some didn’t like trying to read it.

Letterpress

Taking ideas into the print room.

Setting type, inking up.

Using this phrase I found in an article about the board game monopoly. It is the game I love to hate. I played it a lot when I was younger but when I think about it, monopoly has been a constant throughout my life. Playing it with friends and family. This phrase makes me question why we play games? Is it to win? Or for the experience and connections the act of play encourages?

Sketch book

Finding phrases in articles about play and sport. What does it mean to play? The value of play is being increasingly recognised for adults as well as children. It allows us to express ourselves. Using stencils to test out some text, again inspired by street art and the artist Christopher Wool.

Image via Frieze.com. Christopher Wool, Untitled, 2000.

Using stencils, thinking about letter placement, I like to put the text close together to make the phrases more enigmatic.

This is sketchbook work so it is super rough.

Coming back to the idea around what is real what is fake? Are we all just playing a game to get through the day?

Ideas/thoughts

Things I have been working on.

Going back to looking at artists that first got me interested in art. Basquiat and Haring. Trying to capture their energy in my work.

Sometimes for me it is the process rather than the product. Using a stencil on another piece and cleaning it on this paper, this accidental work happened. I quite liked it, so I played around with it.

Inspired by a book called “Power of Play”. An insightful look at how as humans our imagination has developed into the “endless game-playing species we are today” (Paul Pethick author). The more I research and dig deeper into the concept of play, the more I find it is integral to discovery, learning and creativity. Play is part of the way we function as humans, we play everyday with ideas, beliefs, other people. It’s ingrained into everyday life.