Cigarette Box, Crochet Hooks (2023), Half Schissor, Faan (2023), Vertebrae, Thimble (2023), Unpickers, Wedding Jewellery (2023), Tailor's Chalk, Comb (2023), Sarota, Glove (2023), Pin Cushion, Bollocks (2023), Lingerie, Chicken Necks (2023), Thread Cutters, Tabiz (2023), Mishti, Syrup, Rag (2023)

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Acrylic on board

12.7cm x 17.8cm

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The “Weighty Scraps” series speaks to the material, social, and spiritual lives of the East End rag trade. The series presents suggestive encounters between objects charged with domestic mythology. These focus on interrogating themes of comfort/danger, food/sex/taboo, luxury/poverty, bad omens/faith and gendered labour/patriarchy/queerness. 

Throughout my work I use a host of symbolic objects to chart the interplay between material and mythological forces in the community; both local to London’s wider history and globally. Co-opting anthropological frameworks on the social lives of things, (“today’s art object is tomorrow’s junk. And yesterday’s junk is tomorrow’s heirloom”), I reassign the quotidian to prestige in defiance of systems of value which cheapen and erase. In giving these objects life akin to personhood, these works straddle still-life and portrait.

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Conceived for City of Burrows at Phillida Reid, 10 March - 15 April 2023.

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Photo: Ben Westoby