My graduate show piece at the Royal College of Art was an installation titled ‘Playing with the Shark, the Bull and the Monkey’. It consisted of a timed sound installation that played recorded noise from the poker hall, 3 paintings from my Action Black series and painted floorboards.
Royal Flush (2017–19), I played poker to raise the £9,500 needed for a year's tuition at the Royal College of Art. Documenting the experience through Instagram stories.
Once you come to the realisation that you are an artist, and following this burning desire that you must fully commit your life to this, everything is a gamble.
I was reading Brian Sutton Smith’s the Ambiguity of Play. As an artist you have the agency to (or arguably you naturally) operate as an anomaly within the various games Sutton Smith highlights that make up our social structures. Gambling became both necessity and artistic process, revealing how chance, strategy, risk and perseverance shape access to education, artistic practice and social mobility.
I had accepted a Scholarship to go to the RCA to study MA Painting. However, there was a 2 stage acceptance, and although, I tried to explain to the admin team that I likely missed that detail due my dyslexia they withdrew the scholarship, forcing me to decide whether to attend now knowing I could only loan enough to cover 1 of the 2 years tuition, or reapply next year and hope for the scholarship.
I started playing poker at the Grosvenor, Europe’s largest poker room, a short cycle from my RCA studio at the Kensington site. Documented through live Instagram broadcasts, the project established a way of thinking in which experience itself became the medium from which subsequent works could develop.
I also was forced to learn about myself as I could not afford to make a mistake. Every day I play chess on Chess.com and I learnt that if I felt happy, I tended to go on a winning streak. Associating happiness with better decision making, more than ever before I paid attention to things that made me happy and made a list that I actively followed in order to maintain that state of mind before going to the Casino.
In no particular order or time frame this included:
- Friends and Family
- Dancing
- Eating well
- Sex
- Money
- Fresh Hair Cut
- Art
- New Clothes
- Football
This list would be at the forefront of my thinking when making future works (Mayfly) putting paint through experiences.
Mayfly was the name of a show at the Hockney Gallery in the Royal College of Art and also formed the name of the largest piece in the show. The work within the space changed multiple times during the day with Samboleap Tol and Andrew Hart adding art works and a sound based performance to this rendition of the work.
