The Lyrics of Our Time

'When you become totally egoless, you can disappear into your own self.' Alan Aldridge

The brief was to select an artist/designer on show at the Design Museum last year, and produce a sculpture that expressed nothing more than their creative process – using a budget of no more than £5.

I chose the work of Alan Aldridge, which has come to epitomise the psychedelic era of the creative arena throughout the 60–70s. For those who are not familiar with his work – Aldridge famously illustrated the Beatles lyrics and developed book covers for Penguin.

After looking past the bombardment of colour and surreal imagery that chacterised his work, I discovered that the designer completed all of his illustrations – without exception – working from the bottom right-hand-corner of the page up to the top-left. This relentless process became the focus of my sculpture. 

Using two copies of the 'The London Paper' (a daily free-sheet projecting the 'lyrics' of our time) backed on to white card; I worked with the corners featured amongst the spread-layouts – text columns, images and headlines – to produce a swarm of abstract fin-like structures that flowed with the Aldridge diagonal. On completing the 36-pages of the newspaper, I paneled them from cover to back using the same diagonal principle to create this 249x177cm sculpture – presenting the flow of direction used to produce each of his psychedelic masterpieces – exchanging the importance of his style for his process.