Gordon Blunkett

“The story was beginning to ingrain itself in the national consciousness... At bus stops, in pubs and in workplaces up and down the country, people were talking about MPs expenses.” – Taken from ‘No Expenses Spared’ by writers for the Telegraph.

I created these bank notes last year as commentable illustrations on the MPs expenses scandal. Each note depicts a perpetrating politician and the amount they claimed on public expenses & for what, duck houses and all. I issued them under 'The Bank of Westminster', as members of parlaiment seem to have slipped into a habit of thinking our country's laws don't apply to them, almost as if they were living in a country all of their own.

I printed each side of each note onto sticker paper, and applied them to cash points and other money-related areas in the locality. Hazel Blears even made it up onto cash recycle for a few months.

iSewn

This snuggly nugget was the first piece of work I did at university. The piece was designed to fulfil an editorial role, and be placed within an article in The Independent entitled "Human contact? I bet there's an iPhone app for that". Subverting the iphone from a cold and technological wonder into a warm, personal and very naive object, was my way of bringing back a tactile element to our interactions which are becoming increasingly digitalised. My thoughts upon completion were to take it bigger, and expand upon this little handheld number and make a bedspread of the same design. Still pending.

Technically I never finished the grey rim of even the small one.

I'll add it to my calendar app.

Piece of Cake

Front.

Back.

In honour of my new blog, I have dug out this intensely confusing fold-out from a couple of years ago. When full size, it was even worse than a large OS map for someone to fold in; you almost needed a key to close it back up - a key of the knowledge of its mechanisms ;) with triangular extra folds and a little labyrinth of turns.

Thirst Date

Today is not really the first of January 2011. Today is a lie fabricated from the future. Unreined possibilities stretch out before all of us, but also lie back where we've forgotten. Or at least, our past selves in the fourth dimension have forgotten.

Today is the dawning of 12th March 2011 and this is the first post of my new blog. I will add in my work as I go, as days tick forward, dating it from this . point in an attempt to guide you neatly up to the present, which is probably the exact moment you're reading this unless you're bending time too.

Let's go on a journey together.

Speaking from the future, this all makes an awful lot of sense. Oh, and your shoe is untied.