Hidden Messages ( 2011) Bloc Billboard, Bloc Projects, Sheffield.
Hidden Messages
This work began as a direct response to advertising — specifically to the way sex is used to sell things, and the brazenness with which explicit imagery appears in everyday public spaces. My reaction wasn't outrage so much as mischief. If advertising was going to use the erotic without apology, I wanted to turn that logic inside out: to hide it so completely inside a decorative pattern that most people would walk straight past it.
The figures in the design are comical and distorted — deliberately so. There is no glamour or seduction in the conventional sense. When people don't see it, the pattern is simply pretty. When they do see it, the reaction is almost always laughter — a moment of surprise and delight that I love about this work. The joke is in the looking, and in the gap between what the eye first accepts and what it eventually finds.
What started as a playful subversion of a Sheffield billboard commission in 2007 became a collection of hand-printed wallpaper designs. Somewhat ironically — given the work's origins as a bit of a joke about advertising — it was picked up by Coco de Mer in London's Covent Garden, leading to private interior design commissions in New York and Los Angeles. A provocative idea about public space ended up on the walls of some very expensive private ones.
Shown at Bloc Billboard, Bloc Projects, Sheffield.
