New badge sets at the We Are Birmingham shop

Now available at the We Are Birmingham shop!

At their request I have now provided the We Are Birmingham shop with a supply of Counsel for the Artist badges. These should be available to buy over the next few days, if they’re not already.

Each pack costs £4 and comes with a random selection of 4 statements taken from the following:

• Set your own agenda.
• Get the message across.
• Resist the ascribed role of witness.
• Circumnavigate predictability.
• Meet a new network.
• Add to a culture of learning and experimentation.
• Make exchanges with spaces.
• Strive to achieve modest connections.

The badges are 25mm in diameter and rather nice!

If you’d like a set but can’t get to the WAB shop in Birmingham city centre, get in touch and we can make arrangements to post them to you.

T-shirts relocated

There’s been a renewed interest in my t-shirt designs recently and this has prompted a re-jig of what was becoming my over-full shop page.

So, I’ve moved all the clothing products off-site to a spreadshirt store. This has simplified the ordering process and has meant there’s more space for additional things with upside-down bits of Japanese cartography on them.

same shirt; different location

The genzaichi/you are here motif is now available on organic, men’s and ladies t-shirts and the Yamanote map and invigilator shirts are also there if you click through to the later pages.

I’m pondering on a furby-related design.

By chance and/or careful planning, spreadshirt are offering a 10% discount on orders over £20 made between 22nd March and 7th April. Enter “HELLOSUN” in the voucher code box in the shopping cart.

Go have a look: http://theinvisiblehand.spreadshirt.co.uk/.

Badges and postcards at the Created in Birmingham shop

As well as being able to buy Uncertain Eastside prints at the Created in Birmingham shop, I’ve also put together some special badge collections that you can only get at the Created in Birmingham shop and in very limited numbers.

SoPG: Yamanote

Back in 2006 I spent 4 intensive days walking around Tokyo. Rather than using my Lonely Planet Guide, I used a map cut from a postcard advertising an exhibition. With all the labels cut off.

Tamachi from nikkipugh on Vimeo.

You can read more about the project here; suffice to say that it was something of a pivotal moment in my practice and is what kicked off the whole genzaichi identity/ethos.

Where will you go and what will you see there?

The pack available at the CiB shop will give you both the appropriated map and the genzaichi/you are here symbol from the Yamanote railway line in badge form. You are invited to use them to instigate a random walk from a railway station (or alternative) of your choosing.

Use them to go somewhere you wouldn’t have otherwise have considered going to and then take some time to get to know that place. See if you can find what the point of special interest is.

Perfect for the latent psychogeographer in all of us!

Counsel for the Artist

At the end of my time at art school, I gathered together all the notes I had made from lectures, conferences, seminars and the such and searched through them picking out phrases that resonated. I found quite a few.

From these I selected the 8 really pertinent ones that I wanted to keep at the forefront of my mind when making work in the years following graduation. These became Counsel for the Artist and they are still cornerstones of my practice nearly 4 years later:

• Make exchanges with spaces
• Strive to achieve modest connections
• Set your own agenda
• Add to a culture of learning and experimentation
• Get the message across
• Meet a new network
• Resist the ascribed role of witness
• Circumnavigate predictability

You may have noticed these statements on my CV, in the tags I use for my blog posts and also about my person in various forms.

Buttons

The thing with these though, is I quickly found that people from other professions were finding the statements resonated strongly with them too. Hence I’m using “artist” in its broadest of terms: “A follower of a pursuit in which skill comes by study or practice”.

Is that you?

You can get a selection of 4 statements to wear on your sleeve (or other location).

Counsel for the Artist badges

Postcards and more

The Yamanote and Counsel for the Artist badge collections are very limited availability, but fear not if you are quick enough to get one before they sell out.

The genzaichi and map designs are available on T-shirts from my online shop, and there are Counsel for the Artist postcards available at CiB and online. Buying some is as simple as getting in touch.

Uncertain Eastside prints

The Uncertain Eastside limited editions prints are now officially available to purchase!

All the prints are A0 (841mm × 1189mm), signed, unframed and come in protective cardboard tubes – you will look after them now, won’t you?

The first batch of prints, rolled up, labelled and ready to go.

There are 2 different series available: A and B.

Series A:

Detail from a Series A print: Digbeth Deritend and Coventry Road.

A set of 3 individual prints, each of one of the double-circuits of the Eastside regeneration area. Limited edition of 10, £50 per set.

I walked around Birmingham’s Eastside regeneration area in pairs of 90 minute circuits – the two walks in each pair happening one straight after the other. These prints make the traces of each walk visible.

Series B:

Detail from a Series B print: Moat Lane and the Bullring markets area.

The traces of all 6 circuits overlaid. Limited edition of 100, £15 each.

These prints show the cumulative traces of all 6 circuits overlaid on top of each other. It becomes a lot harder to pick out the individual circuits, but instead it makes the patterns of glitches visible and you can see how the physical landscape of the city affects the different parts of the drawings.

How to order

These prints are available through my online shop The Invisible Hand. Simply send me a message via the order form telling me which items you would like to purchase and I will then contact you back with confirmation and postage/delivery information etc.

buy, buy, buy!

Just in time to coordinate with the Artgos exhibition/event the invisible hand is now back open for business.

I experimented with a print-on-demand service earlier this year and, having just received a trial print of the new genzaichi/you are here T-shirt, I’m happy to say it passes the quality control test and the shop is now live and open for business!

The incentive for the invisible hand came about after increasing frustration that I’d already put all my own spare money into a few major projects – thus leaving me reliant on external funding for upcoming ideas I wanted to develop further. This is ok for some things, but I’d rather not be completely dependent on Arts Council and the like anyway, and sometimes you just need to be able to access some cash on a timescale of less than two months.

This has increasingly been the case as my practice simultaneously moves further into areas that are difficult to describe in a funder-friendly manner (what exactly are the outcomes going to be?) and that need me to be responsive to things happening around me.

The invisible hand was therefore developed as a way for my practice to become more self-supporting. Rather than selling actual artworks (I don’t usually produce objects), I’ve gathered together some of the core ideas that run through my work and I’m now selling products that relate to those. It will also come into play during 2008 in relation to a few publishing projects I’m working on. Watch this space…

So, if you fancy a t-shirt with an obscure Japanese railway reference (niche market?) or some badges bearing manifesto-esqe statements, the invisible hand is the retail outlet for you!

Payments are all handled via PayPal and absolutely all of the profit goes into a pot that will only be used in the production of art works. I’ve indicated by each item approximately how much from each sale goes into the project fund.

I’m in two minds about whether to develop any invisible hand branding or not, but I’m thinking it would be really nice to be able to add an invisible hand logo alongside any others that may have supported a project. I want to be able to say somehow that “this work wasn’t all funded by government hand-outs y’know!”.

What do you think?