A Girl, Her Clown and the Power of Nostalgia in Art
One morning in 2018 I found myself sat in a smooth leather booth in Soho below one of the worst Damien Hirst pieces I had ever seen. It was one of his spot paintings, drunkenly scribbled on the back of a restaurant receipt as a means of payment instead of stumping up any cash. Kate Bryan, head of the art collection at Soho House, was using it to explain to me how the private members club structured relationships with their artists. Hirst had inspired them, the deal is effectively: give us your art and you get to get drunk for free. If you were getting drunk for free in a Weatherspoons this probably wouldn’t be enough. But this is Soho House, its real fancy, there are celebrities everywhere, everyone is sexy and if they’re not then they at least look very rich and enigmatic. Did I want to be one of those artists? Yes, yes I did.
Its a clever strategy. What’s the cost of a few martinis in exchange for that god particle of cool that artwork and the presence of artists themselves can bring to a space? I hadn’t noticed the Damien Hirst until it was pointed out to me, I was too busy looking at all the other amazing artworks that filled the walls of their Dean Street venue in which we were having this meeting. This strategy can only work with the right curation though. If you fill a space with shit art its not going to be the kind of place a Hollywood star wants to go for a quiet drink on their London press tour. In Kate Bryan they had hired exactly the right curator for the job. I tried to maintain my poker face while she laid out what this would all mean for me.
Kate explained they were about to open a big new ‘House’, as they call their venues, in the historic Television Centre, in White City West London, which had been home to the BBC for decades until its move up North to Salford in 2013. Would I be interested in making some work to go in their new venue? Absolutely. Kate was intrigued by the work I was creating at the time that used a lot of found imagery as a jumping point for painting and collage. Then she told me that Nick Jones, the founder of Soho House, was keen for someone to do something with the classic Test Card F image. So could I try and create something interesting with that?
That unnerving photo of a girl with her clown teddy surrounded by strange grey lines was seared deep into my unconscious. It reminds me of Christmas mornings as a child. I would wake up absurdly early, switch on the TV and wait for everyone else to get up so I could open my presents. But instead of cartoons I was met with the strange soft stare of the girl and her clown frozen in pretend play of a games of noughts and crosses. No shows just yet, too early. Its the image the BBC used to use as its screen saver of sorts, it would come on screen when programming finished for the day and before it began in the morning. Just the idea of video content having a beginning and an end feels absurd now, there used to be limits.
The girl’s name is Carol Hersee, the most appeared woman in British TV history. She’s the daughter of the Test Card’s designer, the BBC engineer George Hersee. The clown is called Bubbles, he was Carol’s teddy. Why did someone give a little girl a frightening clown teddy? We’ll never know. But she still owns him to this day. Every aspect of Test Card F has a technical function to ensure correct transmission. Old cathode ray tube TV’s used to have is a multitude of issues we’ve long since forgotten in the digital era: signal reflections, ringing and chrominance delay are things of the past. Carol is there to check correct skin tone, Bubbles is there to freak you out.
I told Kate I was keen to work with this incredibly nostalgic image. Art often seems to come back to childhood, it can be a space to reimagine nostalgic images and feelings in powerful new forms. To me Test Card F meant kids TV: bright, bold colours and sugary excitement. Someone’s teacher about to get gunged in acidic green gloop or the calming embrace of blueness in the Blue Peter studio with a sleepy golden retriever on the sofa. That was what I wanted to bring to my version of the Test Card F. I knew that the mirror magic of reverse-glass gilding and pigment rich enamel paints could do just that. Kate encouraged me to go a bit bigger than usual for this piece, so I went away and welded a steel frame that was over double the size of my previous best.
I spent the next fortnight dancing around my small shared studio space with a huge piece of 4mm thick glass. Luckily, I decided that it was the time to start making films of my process. The sharp perfection of finished glass gilding makes it very difficult to see how much of the hand goes into making it. The Test Card was the perfect test subject for my mini one man documentaries to start showing people how it was done. I fired up my new Sony A7, clicked in the 50mm Sonnar Zeiss lens and got filming.
The sound I recorded was chaotic. A month before I began work on this piece we moved as a collective of 24 different artists, designers, writers and photographers into the whole floor of an old clothing factory warehouse space in Manor House to set up a new shared studio. Open plan bedlam ensued. Thankfully, one of those I shared with was Erin Hopkins who made that wonderful soundtrack of BBC presenters signing off for the night before it was time for Carol and Bubbles to come on screen for the night shift. Below is the one minute film that I shot and edited of me creating the original glass Test Card F piece.
Somehow I managed to squeeze the finished piece into the boot of my Mum’s Skoda Yeti and we headed over to Television Centre to drop it off. After that I heard nothing from Kate Bryan or any of the other curation team for a couple of weeks. Did they like it? Did it hang OK? No idea. Then I got an invite to the first of three opening parties for the new White City House. This was the party for the artists, interior designers and other insiders who had made the new venue happen. The celebrity party was next and then finally the one for the richest and most powerful members. Kate asked if I could arrive early, they wanted to film some interviews with the artists involved about their work.
5:00pm is too early to show up to a party with that many free cocktails. To make matters worse I had huge adrenaline rush that needed sedating. Because as soon I swung open the big glass and steel door I was met with Carol’s strange stare. My Test Card F was the very first bit of art you see, right next to the front desk. The piece that defines the tone of the whole venue. Around the corner from it was a series of Peter Blake’s. I couldn’t believe it. Kate met me and said they weren’t going to bother filming, it was already too busy, just have a drink, relax and mingle she said. Yeh sure, no problem, I replied, desperately trying to maintain some cool.
We weren’t in Kansas anymore, Toto, this was truly how the other half lived. As I climbed the spiral staircase up onto the rooftop and looked out over the pool across the London skyline I felt like a fraud. Everything fixture and fitting was so flawless and everyone looked so glamorous. It was a far cry from the decrepit warehouse I spent my days in on the other side of town. Life as a freelance artist and sign painter can’t afford these spaces, they’re not for me. I drank three cocktails in the first half an hour which helped. Eventually I found people to chat to who didn’t frighten me and had a great night. The last thing I remember is literally bumping into Vic Reeves on the dance floor.
Once the glory of that night had died down as I was left to enjoy the fruits of my art for lifestyle exchange. I had swapped my Test Card for membership to all of their houses and thousands of pounds of credit to burn in them. My first move was to blow most of that credit on a long weekend living like a Georgian Lord at Babington House just outside of Bath. The list of celebrities who’ve gotten married there tells its own story (Damien Duff!). Three nights in their most expensive room and open season in the bar and restaurants with my then girlfriend Clare in glorious late spring sunshine. The seduction of that level of luxury is strong. Why can’t life always be like this? Well, because I don’t work in finance, thats why. But the paradox when it comes to spaces like Soho House is that I wouldn’t be allowed in if I worked in finance, that’s not interesting enough for them. They want the blood of the ‘creatives’ running through their veins. Wearing a suit is explicitly outlawed. Money on its own isn’t enough to make you a member.
Back in London I tried to make the most of my free access to these exclusive ‘Houses’ that everyone seemed to want so desperately. Sometimes on my way in to the studio I would pop in to Shoreditch House for a yoga class, followed by a sauna session and then hit up the buffet breakfast. Not a bad start to the day. But as you walk around these spaces there’s one dominant feeling: a constant sense of being looked up and down, checked out, “who are you then?” - which makes it very hard to really relax. The other reality is that they’re just filled with people on their own hunched over their Macbooks tapping away all day and well into the evening. They could be in their bedrooms doing the exact same thing, but they’re here just in case they rub shoulders with the right producer who just so happens to be having brunch with Aleesha Dixon or Roman Kemp on the next table. Fair enough, but it makes for a lifeless space. A bit like a WeWork but with better artwork and more interesting conversations to eavesdrop on.
Ultimately a Soho House membership is most valuable to people who’s work lives and dies on their network. There a lot of roles within creative industries where network is paramount, being a visual artist feels like it isn’t one of them. Most artists find the idea of networking a dirty concept, something people on Linkdn do when they’re not at boring conferences. But actually it is very important, probably more so than your talent level. Art is sadly not a meritocracy, not even close. Who you know and who can convince of your brilliance is a massive marker in success or failure as a career artist. The one piece of advice I would give to anyone aspiring to make a career as an artist is to get out and meet three new people a week and tell them you’re an artist. Its harder than it sounds, believe me. Just look at how I failed to make the most of the being in the most perfect networking pool for an artist imaginable.
A year on from that White City Launch and I got a call from Kate Bryan to be involved in their next venture: Soho Editions, a range of limited edition screen prints from artists with work in Soho House venues. The Test Card was an obvious choice, it had been a big hit - “easily one of the most popular artworks we’ve ever put in a House” according to Kate. Another fancy launch event ensued. This time I took my Mum along as my guest to say thanks for her assistance with the Skoda Yeti. She loved it. And after a year of slowly ingratiating myself into that world I felt more at ease and didn’t need quite so many cocktails to have a good time.
The collection launched on the Friday and by Sunday afternoon all twenty five prints in the Test Card edition were sold. I started to get desperate emails from people. They told me all about what the Test Card image meant to them in the hope that I would somehow be able to grant them a print that was already sold out but there was nothing I could do. A couple of years later I convinced the Soho Editions team to do second version with a new colour palette and that edition sold out in under a weekend as well. Like I said, nostalgia and artwork is a powerful potion.
Now the Test Card edition is back for a third rodeo. And this time its coming direct from me to you. As you’re reading this Carol and Bubbles are being silkscreened onto sheet after sheet of heavyweight paper, surrounded by cubes of colour that stay loyal to the original glass piece’s CBBC intensity. There remains a huge amount of gilding to be done on these new prints. The Test Card Fs are the same size as the Fail We May, Sail We Must edition but they will easily use up twice as much gold and take twice as long to gild. Please pray for my back.
The all new third edition of the Test Card F will drop next Thursday the 9th of May at 5pm BST. If the last two are anything to go by you’ll need to move fast to make sure you get one of twenty five that will be available. Next week’s Substack will arrive in your inbox when they launch with a cheeky discount code, so stay tuned for that.
Art - tick.
BBC nostalgia - tick.
Soho House - tick.
Great writing; an engrossing - tick.