Proud as punch to finally be sharing my first new artwork series in 2 bloody years. After many on + off again attempts at cracking beautiful (and fashionable) emotional baggage, I nearly gave up on perfecting these.
I wanted to put my fist through them on multiple occasions (and certainly did more than once) but they finally feel just right + now I love the sweet hell out of them. Each bag has a phrase on it that might come to mind when walking past someone carrying one of these bags in real life (everything from the envious ‘Fancy Fuck’ exclamation, to the shoulder shrugging, ‘Why Not’).

The original idea was to do shopping bags full of flowers, as a symbol for your baggage being beautiful, but after (as you’ll soon see) a shitload of failed attempts on and off over the years, most of those earlier versions never went further than the floor of my studio.

After 50 or so attempts of bagging blooms, it became clear that something wasn’t sitting right with my soul; I really hated filling the ultimate symbol of commercialism up with something so raw and real and alive. My other pieces are always broken and blooming; poking fun at the line between commercialism and art.

Shopping bags full of blooms felt like I was celebrating these brands, instead of questioning their place in the art world.

So I emptied them out and started jotting down a different kind of shopping list. One with questions that, after a year of pandemic madness, I really wanted to know the answer to.