Revolutionary Poster #1 2025

Revolutionary Poster #1 is a puzzle made of 140 birch tiles on an A1 oak frame which can be arranged to form a copy of ‘The Talisman’ by Paul Sérusier or four slogans; ‘Danger AI at Work’, ‘Greed Kills’, ‘Anti Social Media’ and ‘Protest and Survive’.

My goal was to create something that, as Lee Ufan describes in his essay ‘the Art of Encounter’, would open a space that ‘eliminates everydayness and arouses fresh perceptions’

I thought how puzzles take their players out of the everyday, and how my own acts of protest have given me a different perspective on how people behave when they encounter someone who is doing something outside of a society norm.

In 1903 Maurice Denis declared ‘The Talisman’ to be a ‘flat surface covered with colours assembled in a certain order’. My idea was to enable reassembly of its colours in different orders to make four harmonious abstracts.

My process is simultaneously analytical and creative. I designed the shapes, colours and lettering on paper. Each of the 140 tiles was then cut, sanded and painted with Michael Harding watercolours, Posca pens for the graffiti and linseed oil to deepen and protect the colours.

The congruent coloured tiles, wooden box and instruction booklet are a tribute to the kindergarten ‘Gifts’ of Friedrich Froebel which revolutionised the way children learned logic, reasoning and spatial awareness. A remarkable number of pioneers of modern art were nurtured at kindergarten using Froebel’s ‘occupational material’.

The act of adding graffiti marks to my own painstaking painting felt like an act of protest. The marks form revolutionary slogans which emerge when the pieces are revolved. I’ve never seen another puzzle of this type, so perhaps, in a small way it is in itself revolutionary.

Student and visitors can play with the puzzle in the Oak Hall at West Dean College of Arts and Conservation where Leonora Carrington, Salvador Dali and Rene Magritte messed about. The tiles make interesting patterns however they are arranged.