Instagram story viewer> @fringetheartist> Posts

Fringe | Contemporary Artist

@fringetheartist

40.5K

followers

329

following

Not everyone understands Mylo.
That’s rather the point.
Original works by Fringe. Sculpture, fine art, limited edition prints.

POSTS STORIES REELS

Blog 3/11. Sleep for sale has to be one of the wildest concepts of our time. Yet, in a world that has wholeheartedly embraced the myth of work-life balance, it seems perfectly normal. As if balance were even possible in a world so spectacularly imbalanced.

Millions lie awake at 2AM worrying about bills, burnout, and how to upgrade everything from laptops to cars to medication. Small wonder that the prospect of total obliteration, otherwise known as sleep, has become so appealing.

Selling sleep as a commodity is like selling fresh air from the Holy Land. And yet, asking someone how they slept is practically a social obligation.

“I slept badly” is really just shorthand for “I’m heading for a shit show.” And once the damage is done, no amount of coffee, positive thinking, or motivational podcasts can undo it.

Curious about this strange business, I went online and discovered its official name: Sleep Capitalization. The commercial exploitation of our most basic biological need, transforming rest into a multi-billion-dollar industry.

Fuelled by anxiety, burnout culture, and an army of sleep-tracking gadgets, the market now wants to monetize every stage of our unconscious existence. Apparently, even doing absolutely nothing requires a subscription.

The industry is valued at $70.3 billion this year, with projections of $90 billion by 2030. Clearly I’ve been in the wrong business. I should have invested in unconsciousness back when I was still making conscious decisions about my future. #fringetheartist by @fringetheartist

Gutinke Meine, MYLO, Nova and Quiet Boy each carry something personal of Fringe.

It began with Gutinke, a forgotten toy immortalised as his alter ego, named after the loving nickname his grandmother called him as a child. Both futuristic and nostalgic, cute and a little forlorn, Gutinke has a familiarity that makes people see something of themselves in him.

MYLO carries childhood’s imagination and vulnerability, while Nova brings love, hope and the feeling of being understood. Quiet Boy holds his thoughts close. His rule is simple: say nothing until it matters. His stillness holds a whole world of feeling.

Together, they tell a story of where we come from, who we become and how much of ourselves we carry along the way.
.
@fringetheartist
www.scapegoatgallery.com
liz@scapegoatgallery.com
.
#fringe #fringetheartist #artist by @fringetheartist

Blog 27/10. In 1998 I became the awesome owner of an iMac G3, strawberry desktop computer that sat like a giant ice cream in the corner of my room, in some house I shared with guys who didn’t share my cool.

It was shaped like a giant teardrop and its pop plastic personality triggered some deep emotion in me. I felt like I had adopted a pet from the future.

My dull and envious housemates had to go to the office to boot up their little grey boxes. I absolutely forbade them from going into my room while I was out, and switching on my machine to get onto the internet which seemed like a kind of religious ritual, not just a casual search for a few facts, as we do now.

Sometime last week I found the thing in a crate in the bottom of a cupboard and it still switches on. I felt like an archaeologist of the future, deeply committed to this overweight shrine to knowledge.

The contents of the machine were a bit ho-hum, some bad creative writing and outdated projects that felt trapped in the 20th Century. It made me realise that while vintage stuff looks forever cool, new ideas are the real fine art of survival. #fringetheartist by @fringetheartist

Blog 20/10. Asynchrone is an old word with a new purpose. It’s like over 300 years old, and always used to refer to things that were out of step with one another. Asynchronous just meant badly timed.

But now someone has gone and changed the meaning of the word, to refer a moment when a computer performs two or more functions simultaneously. And since it’s not something you ask someone else to do, with or for you, the new meaning of the word kind of passes you by.

Asynchronous activity is just part of lives now: besides referring to automatically induced multitasking, it also refers to communication with you, that’s still happening while you just live your little life: like emails, digital blogs, programme updates, and shared documents. So basically, the asynchronous part of our existence is huge and ongoing, happening in complete isolation from others.

I’m so asynchronous that I really don’t know what my apps are doing most of the time, even though they have become such an indispensable part of my life. But really, how different am I to everyone else?

It’s amazing that there’s this hidden, digital life of information running rampant around us, from some nether world, preparing us for the things we should see online. Our machines are controlling our minds, and we’re not noticing it. #fringetheartist by @fringetheartist

“Keeper” is a celebration of the abundance of connection and the beauty we hold close. Perched above the vessel, Mylo becomes the guardian of beauty, protecting the memories, emotions and relationships that give life meaning.
A playful yet poignant reminder that true wealth lies not in what we possess, but in what we cherish and preserve. by @fringetheartist

Blog 13/9. Strange how people walk around with the names of cities on their t-shirts that they’ve never visited, and probably will never visit in their lives.

The amazing thing is that no one needs an explanation because it’s such a common fashion statement that we forgive the envy, and we think, well, even if you did go there, now you just want someone to feel jealous that you broke out for long enough, and went far away enough to get the shirt. At the very least.

It suggests that the place you’re in, when you wear the shirt, is so much worse than the place you’d like people to think you’ve been. Miami, London, Paris, New York, Tokyo, Amsterdam. Do people in those cities want to wear a t-shirt brandishing the name of the sad place that you come from?

In popular culture that’s become a lame self-aggrandising compliment: I’ve done X and I’ve got the shirt to prove it. Imagine Elon Musk’s kid someday wearing a t-shirt, with the slogan: My father took a rocket to Mars and all he got me was this shirt.

Which makes me wonder what the capital of Mars will one day be called. And if it’s printed on a t-shirt will anyone think, well you could have got it at the airport, when you were on a connecting flight to somewhere else. #fringetheartist by @fringetheartist

Sunday. Test the day. Make it fun. by @fringetheartist

Oooooooo’ by @fringetheartist

Blog 6/10. Those are not the binaries, someone said in the middle of an argument. She really meant that the world is not divided into black and white, but into shades of grey. It’s comfortable, but it also means that certain people never have to take a fixed position on anything.

Basically, for them everything is almost the same as everything else. How do they decide what art to live with?

I had an aunt who called that kind of person, namby-pamby, which is officially defined as, ‘weak, indecisive, overly sentimental, or lacking the emotional and physical strength to be tough or effective.’
The same old lady, who is sadly no longer with us, used to say things like ‘the world is divided into two kinds of people: ones who tell you how much they spent on things, and others who tell you how little.’

Well she would’ve hated the world of today. I went to look at a new studio and I was given a choice: one with natural light, and one buried deep inside a building with no natural light, only tungsten bulbs. I thought, well those are the binaries: you either breathe or you die. What could be simpler than that?

Someone once told me that if you make music for everybody, you make music for nobody. I thought about that while standing backstage, listening to a bass line coming through a wall and watching somebody’s mother dance in the corridor. It seemed to me that she had solved the problem. She also used to say you could tell what kind of person someone was by what they did when nobody was watching. #fringetheartist by @fringetheartist

Blog 29/9. Art gives one a simple life. Not really. It’s something you have to master. Like walking to the corner shop for supplies.

I did it twice this week and it felt so retro. I had to remind myself that I’m not an artist who arrives at events in a limousine. I’m just a regular guy doing regular things, meandering around the neighbourhood while deep in the throes of a solitary existential debate — with myself.

This week I was wondering whether Goldilocks is exclusive to planet Earth. When the aliens pull in, I thought, it’s not going to make much sense to tell them everything is so good here because of the Goldilocks effect. They probably don’t have children’s storybooks anyway.

Although, if aliens have a nurturing tendency, maybe they tell their children stories about other children who survived terrible danger. Maybe they have an alien Goldilocks who wanders into the breakfast room of another species and eats their porridge.

It turns out Goldilocks has had quite a career outside the forest. Scientists use the idea of ‘just right’ to describe everything from planets that are the right distance from their stars to babies paying attention to things that are neither too simple nor too complicated.

There’s even a Goldilocks economy, which makes me wonder about art.

Is there a sweet spot where an artwork is neither too hot nor too cold? Too obvious, too obscure. Too polished, too rough? Perhaps the trick is that ‘just right’ doesn’t mean safe. It means alive.

So maybe Goldilocks wasn’t looking for the perfect bowl of porridge after all. Maybe she was looking for the exact point where things get interesting.

#fringetheartist by @fringetheartist

Summer dump. by @fringetheartist

Ride the lightning by @fringetheartist