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BP: BEYOND PARODY

Painted a quick one today after hearing BP are walking back their already water-thin commitments to renewable energy and investing billions more in getting as much oil and gas out of the ground as they can in order to set fire to your grandchildren. In 2000 BP rebranded itself from British Petroleum to “Beyond Petroleum” in an early attempt at obvious greenwashing. It also popularised the concept of the Personal Carbon Footprint with a $250 million ad campaign in 2003, just before the Iraq war opened up billions of dollars worth of oil reserves for BP and other US/UK oil companies to loot.

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BARCLAYS X WIMBLEDON

I designed this poster as part of a new campaign by Brandalism taking over more than 300 commercial billboard, tube and bus shelter ads near the Wimbledon tennis tournament. “According to experts, Barclays is Europe’s largest funder of fossil fuels since 2016, and is a major lender to weapons companies supplying Israel. Last year alone, Barclays provided over £17.5 billion to fossil fuel companies driving up emissions and pollution, a 10% increase on the year before. Since 2019, they have provided over £6 billion in loans and underwriting to companies supplying Israel with weapons and military technology.” [Link]

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SHELL AGM

A new poster I made about Shell’s attitude towards the climate crisis has made its way onto hundreds of billboards, bus stops and tube carriages ahead of the Shell shareholders AGM next week. Massive thanks to Brandalism and all the tireless install teams who put these up! Will post more photos here soon.

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NIGER DELTA HELL BUS

Presenting the Niger Delta Hell Bus! A collaboration with Lekeh Development Foundation in support of Ogoni climate activists in the Niger Delta. I’m leaving Nigeria today so took a few photos for the road. There’s still things I want to add to the bus, a speaker system on the roof, ladders, and some sort of foldable stage would be great and it need a lot more sirens and lights (so it looks like a real Nigerian bus). Massive thanks to everyone who generously chipped into the crowdfunder to help make this version of the bus a reality, I’ve left the crowdfunder open until the end of the month to try and cover the bus’s running costs and also to fund a Hell t-shirt giveaway to activists out here since the shirts we printed for the march were so popular.

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HELL IN THE NIGER DELTA – DOCUMENTARY

I put together a short documentary about my visit to Nigeria for the first Niger Delta climate change conference organised by Lekeh Development Foundation (LEDEF). See my previous post about the trip here. One of the most polluted areas on the planet, the Niger Delta has a life expectancy of just 41 years due to decades of Shell oil spills & constant gas flaring. As part of the conference we visited two Shell oil spill sites in Eleme and K-Dere, Ogoniland, to see first hand some of the horrors that Shell has unleashed on this part of the world for over 65 years. The Eleme spill occurred in June 2023, K-Dere was in 2020, and is still untreated as of August 2023.

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SHELL IN NIGER DELTA

Yesterday I visited two Shell oil spill sites in the Niger Delta with Ogoni climate activists from Lekeh Development Foundation, local community leaders, and West African climate experts. It might be the saddest and most enraging thing I have ever seen. While there I filmed Ogoni community leaders, activists, students and doctors, explaining the situation and the suffering of these communities, and captured footage of the ecological devastation Shell and other oil companies have brought to their homes. See my story for one of these videos, the rest I need time to edit and upload.

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HELL BIKE AT ‘THE BIG ONE’

The Hell Bike I designed for Fossil Free London got plenty of action last weekend at The Big One demos outside Parliament. It had a great reaction at the protest and I was really happy to see it in its stationary and marching modes. The banners are retractable depending on what the bike is being used for (and how windy it is). I wanted to make something that is as versatile as possible for all the different types of actions and protests it will be needed on, as it’s not just a straight-up art thing, it actually needs to be useful!As for the Hell Bus I hope to have some news about that in the coming weeks..

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JUST STOP OIL AT THE SNOOKER

A quick one I painted today inspired by yesterday’s Just Stop Oil demonstration at the snooker. Something worth considering for the armchair strategists who disapprove of these tactics: look up the tactics of the Suffragettes. Not just when they chained themselves to railings and jumped in front of a racehorse, I mean all the tactics. Look at how they burned down churches, poured ink into post boxes, fought police in the streets, set fire to moving trains and interfered with rail signals to try and cause crashes, threw an axe at the prime minister. Ask yourself if you would have supported the Suffragettes *at the time*, rather than from the comfort of the present where we can rest assured the campaign was just & effective. I would have even struggled with it, as I have with some climate actions. But on balance, the scale of the injustice at hand requires interventions that disrupt normal life. How can you have a normal society when half the population are denied human rights? How can you have a normal society that runs on fuels that will end organised human life on earth?

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OVERTAKEN BY REALITY: SATIRE INSIDE A DYSTOPIA

Between the Pope auctioning off his autographed Lamborghini for charity, Lockheed Martin bidding to run NHS GP surgeries, and the FBI’s social media tributes to Martin Luther King Jr, it’s easy to come to the conclusion that satire is dead. And maybe it is. As an artist who uses satire in my work I’ve been overtaken by reality more than once, and sometimes wondered if maybe I’m not making jokes, but accidentally producing comically malevolent ideas that could actually be used by the bastards who run the place.

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CARBON CAPTURE AT THE SCIENCE MUSEUM – BROUGHT TO YOU BY SHELL

Some impromptu new exhibits appeared today as part of the Shell-sponsored carbon capture exhibition at the Science Museum, London. ⁠ I thought it was weird that an exhibition about carbon capture, paid for by an oil company, didn’t once mention that 81% of all the carbon *ever* captured by this technology has been used by oil companies and pumped back into oil wells to help extract more oil. Seems like a significant omission (ok yes we can call it a ‘carbon omission’) Also thought it was weird that the exhibition didn’t mention that oil corporations are some of the biggest investors in carbon capture and storage (CCS) technology. No doubt because of how useful it is to them in getting more oil out of the ground, while being able to pass it off as a ‘green technology’ for tax breaks and marketing purposes. But now at least, for a time, the Science Museum exhibition does mention those things, as well featuring a great new idea about a super useful product to turn all that captured carbon into.

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HELL BUS @ GLASTONBURY

Glastonbury was absolutely incredible, thanks to everyone who called into the Hell Bus in Shangri-La. A massive thanks to everyone at Shangri-La for having me, and to my amazing Hell Bus hard party/work crew: @thetwopack, @kestra.laurent.dances.the.bug, @pineapple_king___ and @hannahslogic. It was hard to get any photos inside the bus when it was full as when it got full it was very full and the queue was out the door. I’d say around two thousand people crammed through this thing over 5 days altho I suspect more than that. The response was amazing and ran the gammut from “is this by Shell?” to “Its fucking boss that innit!” and “that was the most randomest thing ever” to “it’s an astonishing piece of work”. But overall it was super positive and I couldn’t have asked for a better crowd and a better reaction. All that work paid off and now we know it works and doesn’t fall apart when countless numbers of smashed people smash through it.

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HELL COMPLETE

I’ve just about recovered from the Hell Bus deadline and journey to and from Glasgow. It was an extremely stressful, frenetic and expensive project but it was also incredible fun and pretty exhilarating to be working on a large-scale exhibition again, (the biggest, and definitely the most complicated I’ve ever done) after the non-year of 2020. I absolutely love a deadline. There’s nothing like the fear of letting people down and making a prize tit of yourself to get you out of bed in the morning. The response to the exhibition was amazing, which I’m sure had nothing to do with the fact I was sitting at the end of the bus grinning and prodding at visitors as they left. The enthusiasm of the response encouraged me as to the viability of properly touring the bus in the new year. (If you run an event that could host the bus in spring/summer 2022 get in touch!)

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HELL BUS AT SHELL HQ

I brought the Hell Bus down to Shell HQ today with Joe Lycett. Parked it outside for almost an hour while the staff inside went into a self-imposed lockdown. The bus was being filmed for a new documentary Joe is making about Shell’s greenwashing PR, which will be out later this month. More details when I have them! The bus will be going to Glasgow for COP26 at the end of the month, and the exhibition inside is still under construction. I’m posting regular updates of my DIY nightmares over on my Instagram story.

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BARCLAYS #FOSSILBANKS

I made a new poster for a Brandalism campaign exposing Barclays’ dirty fossil fuel links and their funding of rainforest-clearing agribusinesses. It’s part of a campaign across 20 UK cities and towns with 200 billboard and bus stop posters. There’s more info and photos of the other artist’s posters in the campaign on the Brandalism website. More of my previous subvertising work here.

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AMAZON BLUE YONDER

I drew this on the day of Jeff Bezos’ first sub orbital space flight in 2021. I hoped it would be a premonition, but maybe we’ll get lucky if Elon ever takes a ride in one of his own rockets. One pretty funny thing about those idiotic tourist flights is that they put Captain Kirk on one of them to help promote the venture and he came back utterly depressed. Here’s what he said when he got back- William Shatner: “The other folks went straight into somersaults and enjoying all the effects of weightlessness. I wanted no part in that. I wanted, needed to get to the window as quickly as possible to see what was out there. “I love the mystery of the universe. I love all the questions that have come to us over thousands of years of exploration and hypotheses… all of that has thrilled me for years… but when I looked in the opposite direction, into space, there was no mystery, no majestic awe to behold… all I saw was death. “It was among the strongest feelings of grief I have ever encountered. The contrast between the vicious coldness of space and the warm nurturing of Earth below filled me with overwhelming sadness. Every day, we are confronted with the knowledge of further destruction of Earth at our hands: the extinction of animal species, of flora and fauna . . . things that took five billion years to evolve, and suddenly we will never see them again because of the interference of mankind. It filled me with dread. My trip to space was supposed to be a celebration; instead, it felt like a funeral.” Fair play to Shatner for laying out the facts. Jeff Bezos, a man who shares far more responsibility for the destruction of […]

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FREE THE PRESS – EXTINCTION REBELLION

I’m happy that Extinction Rebellion have used my ‘Don’t Believe Everything Billionaires Tell You’ image as part of a their #FreeThePress campaign. It’s an uphill struggle to convince the public of the urgency of the climate crisis with the media consolidated in the hands of handful of billionaires who’s interests are best served by our continued reliance on fossil fuels. Extinction Rebellion’s blockade of Rupert Murdoch’s printing presses last year was one of their most impressive and effective actions to date. Prints, t-shirts, stickers and postcards of the original artwork are available from my shop.

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HSBC’S EMPTY CLIMATE PROMISES

I designed a new poster for Brandalism’s ongoing campaign focusing on HSBC’s empty climate promises. Billboard and bus stop posters were installed around the UK by Brandalism and volunteers from other anti-advertising groups. Massive thanks to everyone who put these in the street. More details about the project on the Brandalism website. More of my subvertising work here: www.spellingmistakescostlives.com/subvertising These posters are a follow up to one I made late last year.

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SURRENDER

All the flags US astronauts planted on the moon are, by now, bleached white by the sun. In hundreds of millions of years, after every trace of civilisation has been wiped from the surface of the earth, these flags will remain on the moon as a final monument to human existence. That and, tragically, two copies of Richard Nixon’s autograph.

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