Welcome... to Open Source Artwork

I’m constantly noting down ideas for new artworks, some of which end up becoming real things, many of which never make it off the page (we could discuss why for hours, but I’d argue it’s mostly lack of capacity/opportunity as opposed to them not being very good. You are welcome to disagree).

I’ve also reached a point in my life where conversation and collaboration are worth more to me than solo endeavour (I think it’s maybe always been this way.) So, Open Source Artwork is an attempt to engage in these things.

What is it?

Contained here is an ever-growing archive of ideas that haven’t yet made it off the page (currently 50+), with an open invitation for anyone to use/make them, either on your own, or in collaboration with me. You might be an artist looking for an idea, a curator looking to fill a spot in an exhibition, or a commissioner with a gig to fill.

The idea of Open Source Artwork is for it to be a resource and also a way of making things real that might otherwise not become so.

I appreciate this could seem egotistical - “Hey, look at all my ideas, AREN’T I TALENTED!” - but it’s really not that. I’d just rather these things got made or, even better, became a conduit for a creative interaction between me and someone else (you).

How does it work?

On the right of the page is a search box. I’ve done my best to tag each idea with as many relevant words as possible relating to their form, narrative, material etc.

So, for example, if you were looking for a public artwork about love, you might type in the search box “public sculpture, love”.

If you were looking for an audio work about dogs and fear for a gallery show, you might type, “audio, sonic, dogs, horror, fear, gallery, exhibition”, and all being well the archive will pull up anything that might be appropriate along those lines for you.

You can also just scroll through them, using the arrow at the bottom of the page to see another 20, or you can click on the tags and categories at the bottom of the posts i.e. if a post has the tag ‘fire’ underneath it, if you click on ‘fire’ it will bring up all the other proposals containing ‘fire’.

What credit do I want?

There are different ways I’m saying these things can be used, with differing levels of credit and involvement from me…

1. You find an idea you like, you contact me and say you’d like me to make it for your exhibition, project, commission (whatever it might be). We figure out the details (budget, timescale etc.) and it happens.

2. You find an idea you like, you contact me and say you’d like us to collaborate on its production. We figure out the details (budget, timescale etc.), it happens, and is forever acknowledged as a collaboration between us.

3. You find an idea you like, you contact me and say you want to use it, I say ‘yes’, then you go and make it. In the exhibition of the work you give me a creative director’s credit.

There will inevitably be some grey areas between these options, but we’ll figure them out as and when they arise.

So…

It’s as simple as that. I hope this seems genuine. It’s meant to be. Now go and find something you want to make and give me a shout…

Black Bag

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).

Sab-bed Bloody Sab-bed

A full-scale marble rendering of the bed from the front cover of Black Sabbath’s ‘Sabbath Bloody Sabbath’ album cover.

Spike

A public sculpture which is a massive rendering of those plastic bird spikes that people put on window ledges and security cameras to prevent birds from landing. The scale of this sculpture will mean it is the perfect size for birds to use it as a perch.

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.

iPhone Notes Mugs

A series of mugs containing images of screenshots of random comments I find I have written in my iPhone notes i.e. CAPITALIST HIPPIES ARE A THING.

Collaborative Print Portofolios

A series of portfolios made up of an identical selection of my prints from across the years. These will be shared with a series of collaborators, who will add to the prints in their own unique way - me + 1 other artist per portfolio. A kind-of Basquiat/Warhol scenario. The portfolios will then be offered for sale as full collaborations.

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…”

Architectural Biography

This could exist as a zine or a more formal publication and would consist of a series of plan drawings of everywhere I’ve ever lived, from memory.

Alongside those drawings would be written a key memory from my time living there.

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.

Desert Head

A single-channel video of a head poking out of the sand in a desert landscape, the eyes are closed, framed in such a way as we can’t tell if it’s someone buried up to their neck or whether it’s a decapitated head.

The eyes dart open and we hear the head’s internal monologue, worrying over trivial and mundane aspects of everyday life - “Did I leave the gas on?!…”

At the end of the monologue the eyes close again.

My ideal ‘head’ would be the actor Paul Putner.

Marble Foot

A marble sculpture of one of my feet, attached to a marble base - as if a fragment from a larger sculpture.

Include this work in every exhibition/project/installation I ever have, with an invitation for visitors to touch the foot to bring them good luck.

Over time this repetitive action will begin to polish and wear-away the marble, as we see with sculptures around the world purported to contain good luck.

Temporary Tattoos

Temporary (water-applied) tattoo sheets as a curatorial project.

Invite a range of artists to come up with a temporary tattoo design and have them produced, collectively, on a single sheet of tattoos.

A group exhibition on a single sheet.

'Phil Myatt' zine

A zine about Phil Myatt, best known for setting up ‘Mothers’ club in Erdington in the late 60s, using the photos, anecdotes, and recorded conversations I gathered from/with Phil when I was researching my ‘A Real Rock Archive’ project…

…such as when he ran a nightclub in Spain in the 60s and a bunch of key players from the England World Cup-winning squad turned up and he convinced Bobby Moore and Geoff Hurst to play on his club’s football team in a beach football match against a rival nightclub the following weekend (I have a photo of this team as evidence).

Origami Extreme

Take a sheet of any size screw-up-able material and screw it up into a ball.

Take a photo.

Flatten it out again and trace over every fold and crease line with a fine-liner pen.

The reference photo and the lines on the piece of paper then exist as some sort of extreme (impossible?) origami proposition.

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.

Titles as T-shirts

The titles of my solo shows re-worked as illsutrated heavy metal t-shirts in collaboration with different artist-illustrators I like i.e.

Here Today, Gone Tomorrow

How Should I Live? (Maybe that’s not the question)

My Empire of Dirt

Revelations: The Poison of Free Thought Prt.II

History is Written by the Winners

Third from the Sun

The Last Judgement

First Phones...

A list of the moment a mobile phone first appears in popular TV programmes from the 90s and 00s i.e.

The Sopranos - S1 E07

It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia - S4 E08

First Words...

A list of the words spoken by the first woman to speak in any film, and the time at which these words are spoken in the film. (This could be broken into decades as a series of mini-projects).

Possibly written/printed as a list.

Possibly compiled into a zine.