I make small pieces of work in small pockets of time. Stitching that fits into an actual pocket and can be done on a bus. Eventually the tiny components become something much larger. Having no studio and multiple dayjobs, all of my artwork has been made in this way.
’Exile Textile 3: The Prequel’, was completed in 2022, but is made up of sections which were sewn years earlier. After the completion of ‘Exile Textile’ and ‘Exile Textile 2:The New Normal’, I was on a bit of a roll and keen to make a third by joining together lots of old work.
Most of it was sewn in 2016-17 and marks deaths and events of the time - Terry Wogan (my Dad despised him, partly because he reckoned he got paid loads for doing Children In Need, but mostly because my mam liked him) George Michael, Barry Hines (Kes was the only book I enjoyed at school), John Berger, Alan Rickman, Paul Daniels, David Bowie, Victoria Wood, Alex Timpson (the most amazing woman), Jill Saward (in 1986, at the age of 21, she was raped by two burglars and the judge said she suffered ‘no great trauma’), Brexit, the Manchester Arena bombing, the Westminster Bridge attack, Grenfell Tower and the Paradise Papers (leaked documents revealing the names of rich people with offshore tax havens, like King Prince Charles).
‘What kind of people are we?’ is something Billy Bragg said on Question Time (2017) in reference to 3,000 ‘refugee’ children that the UK was refusing to accommodate. He also paraphrased Tony Benn in saying that the way a government treats refugees is the way they’d treat the rest of us given half the chance.
Kunst (and also the ‘C’) was intended to be a tory Venn Diagram, but I never finished.
The red background on the bottom right corner is made up of squares of National Portrait Gallery uniforms (mine and my frolleagues’), stitched in 2014. The blue squares are cut from a tie (shoutout to Carl). The yellow chainstitched writing, bottom right quarter, is on the same uniform and made on my commute to said gallery.
The ‘2017’ was stitched on NYE 2016, and destined to become part of my RA rejection piece, but I couldn’t find it at the time. The words ‘then’ and ‘will’ and ‘stronger economy’ were meant to be part of the Gyles Brandreth Brexit piece.
‘BFF Joe Lycett’ is in reference to me appearing on ‘Joe Lycett: Summer Exhibitionist’ (it was on the iPlayer for ages, but isn’t now) on account of the Royal Academy rejecting my work for 30 years.
I can’t remember why I stitched ‘Prejudice’ or ‘Big Boy Pants’, except that the latter was something to do with Boris Johnson.
That’s a portrait of my green daughter from 15 years ago.
The random numbers are from a ‘maternity leave’ advent calendar I started 24 years ago, but never finished.
Photo by Phil Shelly
