V.I.P oil pastel on found wood - sealed

The person in this photo (at the bottom) is my friend Irish Alex. He's a super talented artist who lives in Cara House - an old converted office block that's part of the warehouse community in North London. You can take a look at Alex's work on Instagram @wehaveheaven. It's truly beautiful stuff!

Alex does work with Natashka - a Brazillian powerhouse who works across multiple DIY events and projects and is also a mum of the coolest kid Cassiel. Anyway, Alex helps Natashka with a project called Clay Play where they pop up around different venues and provide clay and resources for people to experiment, learn and create sculptures or whatever they want to out of clay. People come along and create some truly amazing things! The project started very small with just some air dry clay and a few sculpting knives at Grow Tottenham (a DIY space we used to run collectively that we lost during lockdown) and now it's run at multiple venues and they even have a kiln to fire the works!

In this picture, I used a reference of Alex and his Irish laughter beaming awkwardly across is slightly shy face - the picture is a mixture of a photo I took of him in his studio, and another photo I took of him as he showed some of his own sculptures during 4C fest (a day destical put on by the residents of warehouse 4C in 2024)

The strange white maze-like creature is one of Alex's sculptures, and the scribblings of flowers and smiley faces and even a snail in the top left are doodles that were on the glass window of 4C that day (I'm not sure who did them)

The big green and magenta face top right? Oh that's a copy of a mural I spraypainted for a local paint shop called VIP graffiti paint that summer. It showed a powerful looking turquoise woman holding a chain and wearing fetish gear!

Alex often shops at VIP too and something about these images, that summer, these specific memories and photographs all just seemed to merge together in my mind as I created this piece!

So here it is - Alex, the VIP