Paul Smith
During my time as a student at Trent Polytechnic, I made a habit of popping into Paul Smith’s first store in Nottingham’s Lace Market. Even though it sold mainly menswear, I found it fascinating with idiosyncratic touches and an unashamed Britishness which I loved. I wasn’t surprised by Paul’s rapid rise through the ranks of British fashion, becoming one of our most prolific designers and biggest personality in the world of style.
Paul came to my Royal College of Art degree show and bought not just one or two sculptures – but all of them. He has continued to champion my work ever since, through thick and thin, and that’s quite something for an artist trying to find their way in the world. Over the years we have collaborated on many projects, including handbags, fabric and ceramic design, but exhibiting my work in his galleries has to be the highlight.
My first show with Paul Smith was in 2015, at the gallery of his flagship store in Albemarle Street, Mayfair, London. I called the exhibition Pom Pom Pompadour, after its namesake sculpture and my favourite piece in the show – a frothy effervescent feathered showgirl headdress. Made with iron nails welded together to form frou-frou pom poms, flouncy feathers from lumpen lead, and flourishes of Rococo ribbon from drainage pipes, inspired by Native American headdresses and the court of Louis XV. An exercise in taking unwieldy, awkward industrial materials and transforming them into their polar opposite!
Pom Pom Pompadour heralded a sea change for my practice – I got ship building – constructing a galleon from pearl necklaces and brooches, a leap of faith and quite unlike anything I’d made before. I named the sculpture Wing Wo Wave after a town in China that specialises in manufacturing pearl adornments in colossal quantities. I set her to sail in the gallery on a tangled sea of wedding tiaras, chokers and earrings.
Super Brew was next up in 2017. For this exhibition, again held at the Albemarle Street gallery, I posed a question: Can you produce a blue blood image from royal-hued Tennents Super cans? I answered this with a series of historical portraits, including Charles of Knightrider Court and Anne of Bleeding Heart Yard. These supersized profiles lined the gallery, their lacy ruffs laser cut from drinks cans.
And so to Paul Smith, Melrose Avenue, LA, 2019 – with its Insta-famous bubble-gum coloured façade and Mexican-flavoured architecture. What a building! What a show! This one I called Heads She Wins. The walls were packed with sculptural renditions of my favourite American coins – all hammered from pewter. My Pisshead sculptures filled the floor space below – I’d folded and crushed hundreds of aluminium drinks cans to make a series of busts depicting kings, queens, writers, the glorious and the pompous – charmingly debunked with the use of a humble tinnie.
