bricolagekitchen, has a back story of Sheffield’s hot metal trades and a grandfather who did rag’n’bone hawking in the 1920s. I focus 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 letterpress printed pamphlets, notebooks, and mini-posters which highlight the politics, ethics and aesthetics of working with ‘rubbish’ . I am also an established scholar with publications such as Junk: Art and Politics of Trash, 2011 and co-edited with J. Tormey, Art, Politics and the Pamphleteer, and perform widely as an improvising musician and work internationally as an artist-curator. I fabricate in Attercliffe, Sheffield (the heart of the scrap trade) at a studio in CADS Eagle Foundry Works formerly the palatial offices for Castmaster Rolls, featuring a grand marble foyer and industrial kitsch mirror on the staircase.
(Note: 50% of funds received for artworks goes to social movements archive Sparrrows’ Nest, Nottingham)
Rubbish poster series 2022
19thc Sheffield slang: kelterment, joram, mullock, tag-rag.Handprinted letterpress on found salvaged early 20thc maps and public works handbooks. Ideal for hanging above your post-Covid home workstation! Roughly A4+
Salvage notebook series 2020 + 2022
Photomontaged covers incorporate 19thc Sheffield slang: skerrick, kelterment, mullock, tag-rag. A6 hand stitched notebooks, assorted found salvaged paper inserts. Editions of 20.
Pocket pamphlet series 2023
19thc Sheffield Slang : letterpress printed, hand stitched ‘pocket’ found paper pamphlets, featuring slang words selected from a 19thc glossary of Sheffield dialect, photomontaged covers. Edition of 20 (2023)
Pocket pamphlet series 2022
Special ‘les petroleuses’ edition 2022 celebrating ten women communards from the 1871 Paris Commune. Pamphlets are linked to my ‘Resonating Women of the Paris Commune‘ project – a set of researched background information, letterpress prints and improvised sonic performances hosted on the bricolagekitchenwebsite. So do your bit to help les femmes de commune de Paris finally burn down the patriarchal order – pull up your comfiest chair, pick up your pocket pamphlet and log in to some radical improv! Edition of 10. Smaller than A6.
Other print stuff….