Exhibition catalogue/artist’s book published by Sternberg Press (2016), with essays by Maeve Connolly, Angus Cameron, Lars Bang Larsen and Tirdad Zolghadr. Edited by Olivia Plender and Gerrie van Noord.

Social Construction, 2012

architectural toy set and posters to assemble 31 different institutional structures

This work is based on the Anchor Stone Blocks, a popular learning game patented by Friedrich Richter in 1884. The game has a similar logic to a system developed by Friedrich Fröbel, the German nineteenth-century educational reformer and inventor of the kindergarten who advocated ‘free play’ in childhood. Unlike Fröbel’s version of the blocks, Social Construction is a ‘closed’ game, which educates players about the institutional structures that make up mainstream society. A limited number of building options are presented on posters papered to the walls, including a church, a school, a military academy, and even a cultural institution.

Set Sail for the Levant: A Board Game About Debt (or a Social Satire), 2007

The board game is a satire on English history. It tells the story of the enclosure of the commons when the countryside was privatised. Players are forced to seek their fortune by migrating from their rural homes to the industrial cities. But in this rigged game, there is only one way to win: set sail and colonise other lands. Through the game’s structure, my hope was that players would feel frustration at their limited choices – go into debt, resort to criminality, or become part of reproducing this system of exploitation elsewhere?

Honey Makes Money Makes Honey, 2012

wicker beehive, brass plaque

A wicker beehive (or skep) was representative of the perfect industrious society in the Victorian period. George Cruikshank famously used it in his satirical cartoon The British Beehive (1867), which appears elsewhere in the exhibition, to represent the economist Adam Smith’s idea of a hierarchically organised society in which there is a clear division of labour.

Stockholm Duck House: Proposed Monument to British Parliamentary Corruption, Circa 2009, 2012

architectural model of painted wood and lead, brass plaque

An image of the Stockholm Duck House was widely circulated in the British media in 2009, becoming the symbol of a corruption scandal, in which many British MPs were found to be fiddling their parliamentary expenses and claiming money for inappropriate items from the public purse. It was an aristocratic Conservative MP, Sir Peter Viggers, who famously claimed for the ‘Stockholm Duck House’. The structure, designed to provide protection for the birds, is based on an eighteenth-century building in Sweden. His expenses files reveal that British taxpayers also footed the bill for 28 tons of horse manure.

The New Jerusalem, 2012, mixed-media installation and video

Filling the gallery are two architectural models that use display methods from the past in order to demonstrate the relationship between imperialism, trade and religion.

Empire City – The World on One Street (2009) represents the British Empire Exhibition, which took place in the West London suburb of Wembley in 1924. As an event, its purpose was to educate the public during their leisure time about Britain’s trading relationships with its colonies and bolster support for imperialism.

O wretched man that I am, that I should sleep in the daytime!

—John Bunyan, The Pilgrim’s Progress (1678)

A second model titled The Truth Itself Speaks Through Me (2012) reveals the journey to the Celestial City recorded in The Pilgrim’s Progress. In the nineteenth century, this book was instrumental in educating the factory workers of the industrial revolution, illustrating the principle that the only route to paradise is through hard work.

Two fabric banners are included in the installation. In Britannia Receiving her Newest Institution, embroidered in the Arts and Crafts style, Britannia is seen holding a miniature version of the Selfridges department store in London. How Paul’s Penny Became a Pound is based on a joyless nineteenth-century book that taught British children about banking.

The Structures and Institutions of the Universal Summerland, 2007, framed ink on paper drawing

An elaborately framed drawing, from my graphic novel A Stellar Key to the Summerland, illustrates the progression up the social ladder that can be made in the afterlife – from slum dwelling to utopian socialism, as exemplified by illustrations of Charles Fourier’s phalanx and Robert Owen’s New Harmony.

Machine Shall Be the Slave of Man, But We Will Not Slave for the Machine, 2009, diorama

A diorama representing a Kibbo Kift camp, with an industrial city and smoke-belching factories in the background.

TAD 292, 2012, archival display

As part of the exhibition I curated a display of archival material from The Open University’s interdisciplinary Art and Environment course which was officially titled ‘TAD 292’ (referring to Technology, Art and Design). The archival presentation comprised course material, including television programmes, letters, vinyl records, artworks, posters, course books and other printed matter.

Entrepreneurial Garden, 2012, mixed-media installation

At MK Gallery, the foyer was transformed into Entrepreneurial Garden, a red, blue, green and yellow Google-style working environment. Visitors were encouraged to use the Entrepreneurial Garden which includes relaxed seating, a coffee machine, plants, table football and basketball hoop, along with motivational prints. An accompanying release agreement (paraphrasing those found on social media platforms) states that any intellectual property produced within the space becomes the property of MK Gallery, and that by reading the text, users of the space immediately indicate consent to its terms.