About
Projects:
-
East London Smells
- A Place of Our Making
- Shadow Play
- Soft Walls
CV
Soft Walls
2024
Soft Walls is a bootleg exhibition format that prints artists’ work onto t-shirts allowing them to share their work wherever and whenever they choose. By taking artworks out of traditional gallery spaces, the project challenges top-down, static approaches to exhibiting, offering a flexible, playful and accessible alternative. The project was developed during my MA research and situated practice at the RCA, responding directly to my experience of being embedded within the institution and as an active member of the student community.
To realise the work, I built a rolling studio from scratch, designing a cabinet on wheels that carried a heat-press machine, a domestic printer hacked to produce sublimation prints, stacks of t-shirts, and various other tools for on-demand making. During RCA’s Festival of Communication 2024 and throughout the ‘end of year show’ season, I took the work across London as an intervention that raised ideas on self-publishing and undisciplined practice.
My studies were supported by a Burberry Foundation scholarship, a grant of £21,500 covering tuition and living costs. To live in as well as study in London, I undertook work as a painter and decorator and did hospitality jobs. When I applied for a £500 materials bursary from RCA to support the making of Soft Walls, it was not granted and I ended up using money that I had allocated for rent. To recoup my costs, I charged for printing t-shirts on a pay-what-you-can basis, taking an average of £6 per shirt, making over £600 during the three days of the exhibition.