“Dirty Beach” – Eco-graffiti by Hanksy

Humour and design have always been topics close to my heart, and I got a chance to explore both with “Dirty Beach”, a series of eco-graffiti works produced from organic, bio-degradable materials for the Brighton Festival, 2009. Drawing on the “saucy” postcard humour from English seaside towns of yesteryear, and using the comedy staples of satire and sexual innuendo, there’s something deliberately, gleefully mischievous and puerile about the whole series. It certainly felt that way when creating them, whether shifting dozens of buckets of pebbles around the beach with friends, rushing out into freshly fallen snow with armfuls of thermos flasks or driving around at 3am with a car full of stencils, homemade “eco” paints and moss cultures…

Often, I was working through fits of giggles and I regularly felt like the naughty school kid drawing an enormous comedy phallus on the classroom blackboard between lessons. Indeed, I had to exercise quite a lot of restraint from including aforementioned comedy phalluses in some of the works themselves. Almost defacing a Banksy (it’s post-modern irony, yeah?!) certainly felt a little bit cheeky and naughty.

With a subject matter as serious as plastic pollution (the possible long term effects of which are truly chilling), visual humour is the perfect vehicle for delivering the message. All too often, art that has a political subtext or agenda is overly dry and can often come across as preachy… The aim with Dirty Beach was to raise a smile in the first instance, rather than being confrontational or beard-strokingly “thought provoking”. Ideally, the works will manage to make people both chuckle and think a bit too, but I’m pleased if they manage to do either.