Animated poster for Grind Your Axe, a Glasgow-based queer night committed to promoting equality in queer parties.
This poster was commissioned by the venue for a night of avant-garde and experimental music. I wanted to visually play with the cliche of experimental music being inaccessible or abstruse. So I made a poster that at first glance seems almost illegible but with a little more focus and attention can be decoded. I did the poster run myself once these were printed, and stuck some up around Glasgow. During the run, two grown men absolutely derided it in front of me not knowing that I had made it, but it was oddly affirming to see it provoke a strong reaction, much like the music it was made to promote.
The plastic bags are an outcome from my ongoing research into the industry of happiness. Positivity and motivation are attitudes that fascinate me, they can almost be neurotic in their relentlessness. Being unconditionally happy is as ridiculous as being inexplicably sad, and is perhaps more insidious because it is insanity with a gaping grin. Positivity and its part in our capitalist society was the focus of this particular outcome. The outcome is a simple disavowal of bought and sold emotions, producing a series of four screen printed plastic bags that reverse the typical message of generic carrier bags whilst posing in their form.
Mary Ocher is an experimental musician as well as a visual artist whose aesthetic is very integrated into her live performances, I wanted to try and take this and distill it into a simple animated poster. Her stage performances incorporate a lot of superstitious/mystic elements but with a modern slant, like a futuristic Pagan. The solution was a looping animated visual, juxtaposing the age-old symbolism of a singular eye and giving it the ubiquitous iris of a buffering graphic.
2 colour risograph a3 poster, 2017.
Taken from a series of posters entitled "Do Good Looks Do Good?" submitted for the 2017 Graphic Matters Poster Competition. Graphic design has a tendency to give itself too much credit for its power to inspire social change/revolution. These series of posters attempt to poke fun at that approach.
Good looks do good sometimes, but most of the time good looking posters do just that - look good.
