Artè Povera was a huge project for me. This was my final project in my Illustration Degree, it ran for over a year and looked at the art of ‘found object’. My project started off by looking at the every day experience and the human condition. 

Initially I had picked some flowers on a walk to get some creative ideas flowing for my project, and when I got home all of the flower had died, and this got me thinking about how humans tend to ruin things, we find something, and take it for ourselves so no one else can enjoy it, and it dies. So I collected items from my everyday experiences. I walked from my car to university every day, so I picked up things I found along the way. This is the key imagery for these pieces...

I had picked up litter that had been run over, weathered and broken. Took the items into uni and documented them. From the drawings I did I wanted to experiment with screen printing the designs onto paper and acrylic that represented the brand of the item found. I have always been fascinated with branding and colour association through branding, as it’s such a huge concept to understand, how a colour can make you think of a brand and ultimately make you buy into it.

All of the prints shown here are hand printed by myself and digitally altered after. These prints eventually led to me looking at recycling and wastage, from this I had hand recycled my own materials from waste products and created a table. I did this because the idea behind taking something that has been discarded and turning the item back into something with a purpose fascinated me. As you can see from my imagery I was hugely inspired by Andy Warhol and Barbra Kruger, as they commented on branding and pop culture in a way that most don’t.