‘One Foot in the Grove’ is back from the 4th of December.
Mutate Britain opens once again for the festive season with loads of new exhibits, new artists and a selection of favourite pieces from past shows.
See weird and wonderful sculptures from The Mutoid Waste Company. Marvel at screen-prints, stencil art, paintings street art and photographs from some of the UK’s finest accepted and unaccepted artists.
Browse the objecs d’art, bric a brac and anarchist crockery all on view and for sale.
Our festival of underground art provides a welcoming, inclusive and visually astounding experience for all ages in an atmospheric 12,000 square foot setting just off Portobello Road.
Walk amongst giant sculptures, installations and unique artwork and hang out for good times at our licensed bar with proper music and delicious grub.
The gallery room offers exclusive posters, prints, originals, sculptures, photography, clothing and object d’art that make perfect prezzies for you and your discerning friends and family. We provide that much needed alternative to the Xmas chaos of Oxford Street – so don’t miss out on the best show in town.
Full dates and opening times below. We look forwarding to seeing you in December!
Opening times:
Opens December 4th to December 20th – FRI / SAT / SUN
For those that haven’t heard, the exhibition One Foot in the Grove by Mutate Britain is currently on under the Westway, Ladbroke Grove, West London; each weekend until November the 1st 2009, 12-10pm.
The Westway is where the UK graffiti scene started in earnest when the Clash bought Futura 2000 there to paint in 1982.
The Mutoid Waste Company are a travelling band of punk-squatter mechanic artists led by Joe Rush that infected the acid house party movement with their dark and surreal bio-mechanoid humour, building scrap metal wastelands and delirious mindscapes in a shock juxtaposition of realities guaranteed to give any trip a hair raising edge.
Think Heironymous Bosch versus Tron and you’re getting somewhere…
Inspired by the desolation of the 80s to escape into a parallel post apocalyptic universe they inspired a generation to create, myself included.
Some of the best acid parties I attended in the late Eighties and early Nineties had input from the Mutoid Waste Crew or their many splinter groups Circus Irritant, Circus Warp, Splattered Fantasy etc, these plunged my young, impressionable and highly expanded consciousness into a Bermuda Triangle of anamorphic archetypes, cyborg spectres and grotesque apparitions in parody of human and machine form, fractured and echoed by laser and strobe, syncopated and shaken with deafening electronic bass.
The vibe was always intensely surreal, the most outrageously attired and hideously painted forms appeared from the flickering fog in theatrical convulsions, the music was the most twisted repetitive acid, deep and tribal, which stripped the senses gradually to total derangement, beat after pounding beat, until finally at one with the music the chaotic environment and your inner world became one.
Now twenty years later the Mutoids are under the Westway, and it’s not a squat, the police are not outside, the pounding house and techno has been replaced by an eclectic mix including ragga, reggae, punk, soca and rockabilly and the sweating, swaying trance-dancers have grown into bespectacled media professionals pushing buggys.
They still roll out the 303 acid sound when the fire-breathing machines get loose though…
Their amazing signature art, friendly warm family atmosphere and tongue-in-cheek vibe is however present in abundance, accessible and inspirational to the whole family, exhibited together with an array of street and graffiti art, so when I was asked to come and paint a wall I was honoured to oblige, being able to give something back to the community that gave so much inspiration to me in the mad days of the late eighties and early nineties!
It was very short notice so I improvised with some graffiti letters with a twist ….
There is no doubt in my mind from the captivated expressions on the faces of their visitors that their inspiration will grow into new and exciting ideas in years to come.
Below you will find details of how to get there and when it’s open. It’s one of London’s biggest underground art events ever. So don’t just hear about it, watch the video, read the info, explore the blog and get down to the show! We promise to look after you with our fully licensed bar, delicious food and inclusive festival atmosphere. There honestly, really and truly is no better way to enjoy art.
I’ve been posting a lot of graffiti based stuff lately, but I never forget my love for good old oil on canvas, so here’s a little something I knocked up way back in the late 90’s called ‘Living Under The Lines’.
I realise it’s already on my main site but thought it deserved a post on the blog as the definitions of what categorisation it may fall into seem have been redefined
I suppose now they call it Lowbrow/ Pop Surrealism. I like to think of it maybe as Urban Visionary but hell what’s in a name, label, tag, school or ism?
It is what it is.
To me at the time it was just a feeling I wanted to get onto canvas. I think I hit the mark.
…there is compelling evidence that the only time quanta ever manifest as particles is when we are looking at them. For instance, when an electron isn’t being looked at, experimental findings suggest that it is always a wave….
Once again this seems more like magic than the kind of behavior we are accustomed to expect from the natural world. Imagine owning a bowling ball that was only a bowling ball when you looked at it. If you sprinkled talcum powder all over a bowling lane and rolled such a “quantum” bowling ball toward the pins, it would trace a single line through the talcum powder while you were watching it. But if you blinked while it was in transit, you would find that for the second or two you were not looking at it the bowling ball stopped tracing a line and instead left a broad wavy strip, like the undulating swath of a desert snake as it moves sideways over the sand….
Such a situation is comparable to the one quantum physicists encountered when they first uncovered evidence that quanta coalesce into particles only when they are being observed.
Physicist Nick Herbert, a supporter of this interpretation, says this has sometimes caused him to imagine that behind his back the world is always,
“a radically ambiguous and ceaselessly flowing quantum soup.”
But whenever he turns around and tries to see the soup, his glance instantly freezes it and turns it back into ordinary reality. He believes this makes us all a little like Midas, the legendary king who never knew the feel of silk or the caress of a human hand because everything he touched turned to gold.
“Likewise humans can never experience the true texture of quantum reality,” says Herbert, “because everything we touch turns to matter.”
…
Buy This Book it may change the way you look at things.
