Foil Notes Part 2: Work. Work. Work?
In the late 1990s, as a student in Hull, it was easy to get temp work in one of the many factories. The first one I worked in was the flower factory (which I misheard as flour factory, also in Hull), set in a large dark green warehouse, filled with cool, moist, fragrant air. My job was to strip leaves from Chrysanthemum stems, fresh off the Rotterdam ferry, as they moved along the conveyor belt, towards the next stages of their journey, before sitting pretty in buckets on garage forecourts across the UK.
I know this is going to sound dumb, especially as my dad worked almost his entire adult life on the assembly line of a washing machine factory, but until I found myself clocked-on and standing at an assembly line station, complete with a tedious, repetitive task, I had never thought much about chains of production. To be fair, my dad acrimoniously never wanted to talk about his work – or for me to work in a factory. I was young, and the profusion of social media reels about ‘how things are made’ hadn't yet arrived. In an instant, the curtain was pulled back: bouquets of flowers had gone from being a welcome gift, to embodying a systematic story about the division of labour: the seed, planting, nurturing, growing, cutting, exporting, travelling, stripping, bundling, wrapping, shipping, consuming. All the people who’d been a part of this process. All the items passing through similar. All the profits leeched up.
As a kid, I remember overhearing recurring talk about the threat of redundancies for my dad and his colleagues, as demands to produce more-profit-for-less-cost perpetually increased. Beyond the factory, my dad seriously messed up in our family, causing long-term damage which I won’t go into. But when I step outside of the situation to explore possible causes for his behaviour, I can't help but think about the accumulating negative consequences of hundreds of years of ruling economic systems, cruelly dependent on the private enclosure of resources and exploitation of vast numbers of people trapped in the boredom of certain kinds of labour, accompanied by the relentless undercurrent of stress thrumming within precariat life. How our densely entangled mesh of individual lives have been, and continue to be shaped by the structural forces of capitalism. Yet, within that seemingly hopeless mesh, there are always tears of agitation, and ever present are the creases of ongoing struggle for collective liberation.
Folded up Temporal Feral Forms tipped out of storage box and exhibited as part of Multiferals, Exeter Phoenix, 2025. Photo credit Dom Moore.
Decades later, here I am, sitting at my desk with the privilege of some time to think and write, while other people graft for peanuts. What an unfair luck-of-the-draw system we're all born into.
For a long while I resisted calling my art ‘work’ because I associated ‘work’ with selling your time to get money to be able to live. I was resentful of how ‘work’ drained my energy, mashed my brain, and took my time [1]. Art was the opposite, it was the thing that energised me, stimulated my brain, and made time non-linear.
During my sloppy reading of Marx, I have come to understand more about my scab view of ‘art not being work’. Turns out there’s a nuance in Marx which acknowledges not all work is miserable, but under capitalism, work is mostly set up in ways that make it alienating. Looking up at a flock of herring gulls flying overhead while I peg out the washing, I pondered if animals beyond humans are also working to survive. Nah, course they’re not. They’re just living, doing their thing. Very much part of the process.
To indulge in a daydream for a moment, let’s say we live in a society where labour is accepted as work that needs to be done for everyone to have a good life. So we all muck in. With the shitty jobs, as much as the nice jobs. Then because the labour is shared out, no one works more than part time, everyone has enough of what they need, without the threat of precarity. Domestic and care work finally valued, visible, and no longer quietly shouldered by some while others clock off. Yes please. There's a lot more to say about this, but that's probably another piece of writing.
Point is, there would be plenty of time to pursue whatever interests you have. So, is art an interest, or work? And what would it look like freed from its current institutional structures, without the art world as we know it being – spoiler warning – complicit in upholding and reproducing existing power [2]? Ouch. Because the irrepressible human impulse to make, play, and imagine was never theirs to own in the first place. Well, I'm not an end game utopian believer, at least not unless some constant struggle is factored in. Humans are way too diverse and interesting to simply live in universal harmony. But we could do a lot better than we currently are under the organised crime racket of capitalism.
Did you know aluminium is mined from reddish brown earth, in places like Guinea, and Australia? It’s made from a sedimentary rock called bauxite, typically found within the first 20 metres of the earth’s surface. Huge explosions rip through the earth to extract it, and then there’s an energy heavy process to refine it, passing through hundreds of workers and machines, until finally I can buy a roll of catering grade 100m x 45cm aluminium foil… to experiment in the studio with.
For me, it's become a material which, while being completely entangled in capitalism – as am I – lends itself to making a stance against it. Disobedient to art market logic… it won't be archiving particularly well, changes all the time, and is actively degrading with handling. If I am following anarchist principles of aiming to live prefiguratively, like we're already free, then, while working to survive under conditions of capitalism, I'm simultaneously taking a stab at pursuing the enigmatic language and uniquely weird humanness of art to transcend capital. The studio is solitary but the encounter with the work isn't. The prefigurative intention isn't in the subject matter… I'm not making art about capitalism. It's in the method: open-ended, rooted in play, leaving space for the viewer's own agency and imagination. Like the herring gulls, just doing their thing.
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1. For context, at this point I was working full time in a large branding design studio, owned by a multinational advertising company, as a disposable digital minion cog helping make delightful corporations like BP, Land Rover, and Vodafone millions of profit. I had progressed from the boredom of factories to creatively extractive work, and still loomed the constant threat of redundancy while living pay cheque to pay cheque. Nowadays, I just about get by working a part time graphic design/social media job, topped up with occasional paid art gigs.
2. This argument is developed at length in Dubrovsky and Graeber's ‘Another Art World’ (2019). Access here.
"We knew it. We knew we were at the mercy of the sustained intravenous Operation Disconnect. It dripped into our throats and pooled in our guts. We felt it through our fingers and couldn't avert our gaze as it slowly hacked into eons of golden data. Only a few benefited from this mass intergenerational warping. So... eventually we said: fuck that shit.” Acrylic paint, mediums, PVA, aluminium foil, pins. 2023