bricolagekitchen prints’n’paper is a Sheffield-based artist, pamphleteer and printmaker with a back story in the city’s metal industries (and grandfather in the ‘rag’n’bone’ and ‘scrap-tatting’ trade.) My practice focuses on the re-use and re-invention of discarded and devalued materials.
As bricolagekitchen prints’n’paper, I salvage packaging, discarded books, public works handbooks, battered maps and architectural blueprints as a basis for Adana and letterpress handprinted pamphlets, notebooks, and mini-posters which highlight the politics, ethics and aesthetics of working with ‘rubbish’. I fabricate in the heart of the scrap trade, in Attercliffe in Sheffield, at a studio in CADS Eagle Foundry Works, formerly the palatial offices for steel manufacturers Castmaster Rolls.
Salvage series includes a range of printed items featuring 19thc Sheffield dialect words for rubbish and scrap – kelterment, joram, mullock, and tag-rag. Mini-posters are handprinted letterpress on Adana on found and salvaged packaging paper, early 20thc maps and French public works handbooks with photomontaged motifs cutout from discarded classic texts.
See my related publications such as Junk: Art and Politics of Trash (2011) and co-edited (with Jane Tormey) Art, Politics and the Pamphleteer(2021).
Contact me at gmwhiteley@btinternet.com if you would like any items. Note: 50% of funds received by bricolagekitchen for artworks will go to social movements archive Sparrows’ Nest, Nottingham.
