Suburban Utopia, An Infertile Place (SU4IP)
Lyndon Watkinson
Lyndon Watkinson (1999) is an artist, designer, writer, and musician based in Sheffield, UK. Democratising art and art context through artworks, publications, graphic design, articles, and sound. Creative director and founder of the online arts organisation SU4IP. His work is characterised by a desire for precision, often depicting aesthetics that celebrate and criticise the absurdity of corporatized identity, calling into question the necessity of creating false exteriors when what is not seen is often just as important.
In late 2020, a blog post entitled Suburban Utopia, An Infertile Place formed part of the wider inquiry and development of his practice for his bachelor's degree in fine art. As his work matured, he applied this term as a formalisation of his creative endeavours, later abbreviating it to SU4IP, now used as a digital alias and publishing entity.
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Digital Collage, 2021
00:52 is a reproduction of multiple lived experiences, interweaving between fiction and non-fictional influences. Lending from the works and lives of Yevgeny Zamyatin and Wassily Kandinsky, 00:52 explores the common ground between vastly differing perspectives.
︎ Wassily Kandinsky’s Yellow-Red-Blue serves as an example of artistic construction that does not entirely operate along a horizontal and vertical axis. While there are a few grid-conforming examples within this piece, Kandinsky creates a composition where one-dimensional and two-dimensional shapes coexist. This painting is a subconscious manifestation of opposing ideological, social, and cultural values coexisting, to the best of their ability, amongst one another, despite their differences.
The varying marks that exist within this work are often indicated to have split from one another, like water and oil would mix. The subtle separation, I believe, was done on purpose to highlight how society in this context was perceived by outsiders to be somewhat cooperative, but on closer inspection, it differed greatly from border to border. These interactions between these varying forms are constructed in Yevgeny Zamyatin’s We. '[St Petersburg] is a metropolis founded on geometric principles, with wide, straight avenues and, in parts, a grid-pattern of streets, and is thus reminiscent of the city where the events of We take place,' writes Hugh Aplin. [1] This city is sealed within a glass dome, creating a grid-enforced environment for the different characters to operate within. Individuals are identified by alphanumeric symbols. Drawing a direct comparison, both compositions operate encased within the grid.
These varying components establish complex and diverse relationships with one another, both conformist and defiant. We details what exists beyond the glass dome, with Yellow-Red-Blue staying well within the borders of its canvas. Both authors lived similar lives, residing in both pre- and post-revolutionary Russia, and their westernised counterparts during the same time period.
I wanted to combine the coloured elements used by Kandinsky with the alphanumeric symbolism of Zamyatin. The background is a beige sampled from Kandinsky's Yellow-Red-Blue, overlaid with a three-by-three grid of teal and deep purple samples. These three elements represent the confinement of both the rectangular canvas and We’s glass dome. The written text overlay is sampled from an A4 shopping list written on the back of a delivery invoice. I used various symbols in various colours to represent the interaction of characters or forms within the dome. I used data compilation as a method to dictate the position of each recycling symbol and evade the responsibility of positioning them myself.
[1] Wassily Kandinsky: Wikipedia. Wassily Kandinsky. Visited: Feb. 2022. URL: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wassily_Kandinsky#/media/File:Kandinsky_-_Jaune_Rouge_Bleu.jpg
[2] Yevgeny Zamyatin, We, Hugh Aplin, Croydon, Great Britain: CPI Group Ltd, 2017. p. IX.
[3] Wikipedia. Recycling Symbol. Visited: Feb. 2022. URL: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Recycling_symbol