TRAPPED (2024) Cat Phillipps
Black ink bleeds across the blanched, pallid faces of MPs, Conservatives atop, Labour below, crowding round their respective leaders. Sunak and Starmer are stood at their dispatch boxes, each spouting their own dubious, mealy-mouthed cant in a bid to retain or gain power. And sandwiched between these two scrofulous assemblies? The word TRAPPED.
That’s us folks! Communities up and down the country who, in the artist Cat Phillipp’s words are, “Caught between two shitshows of self-serving power, no guiding principles, just the toxic leak of greed, and people left to survive a national landscape devastated by politics sleeping with corporate power.”
The time-honoured tradition of defacement being a valid mode of visual protest pertains to this latest flyingleaps poster by Phillipps. We’ve seen recently an escalation of toppled statues, vandalised ‘masterpieces’, graffitied monuments: all last-resort bids to be heard, to rail at and counter a politics that ignores or, worse still, blatantly patronises its voting public.
Trapped (2024) follows on from an earlier series of works where world leaders’ portraits are subjected to a similar partial scrub and tangled inky tarnishing. Phillipps was a professional photographic printer and is more than capable of producing a fine digital print. Here she’s disavowed the principles of museum quality printing. These unprincipled weasels don’t deserve such care. The artist elaborates on this aesthetic, “Fuck it. Fuck high end principles, fuck printing principles, fuck respecting any principles in the rendition of these subjects, these politicians, these men in suits. Print on pathetically thin plastics, let the inks from the machine dribble, leaking across the surface, breaking apart the forms of these people in suits, these people in power. Let these forms reveal the consequence of their actions, let them be presented to the audience for the toxic, corrupted, destructive entities that they are, no longer afforded the protective polish of their immaculate suits and outfits used to disguise their filthy rackets.”