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, 2022
01:05 recreates William Morris’ Trellis using 21st-century technology standards to juxtapose the Arts and Crafts movement, which traditionally advocated for the opposite. Navigating the division of nature, sampling from an archive of collected photographs, embedding multiple layers of nostalgia into a trellis-inspired format.
︎ The grid is a high-level example of abstraction that was created entirely in the human mind to satisfy a desire for standardization. The grid is a product of affluence enabled by socio-economic advancement. The less time humans had to worry about whether they were going to have their next meal, the more time they had to spend contemplating whether their respective lands were optimally or aesthetically divided up.
William Morris’ Trellis is born out of complicated and somewhat conflicting human desires. While not naturally occurring in nature, the grid is used in this case as a tool to return to pre-industry. The grid appears as a trellis, a manifestation of man imposing his will on nature. The Art and Crafts Movement is picky about how nostalgic it wants to be: far enough back to avoid industrialization but not so far back that man yields his perceived control over nature.
Morris and Webb were willing to forego just enough modernisation to avoid the perceived savagery of indigenous peoples within the United Kingdom's colonial territories. While the movement was inherently socialist, choosing between different degrees of social, political, cultural, and technological progress is dysfunctional; unsatisfied with the gratification of fine craftsmanship alone, they would claim to accept it as payment. Like the grid, the depiction of brambles, wildflowers, and birds co-existing in complete harmony upon a trellis is a product of human imagination alone. While designs like this are done for appearance rather than plausibility, they are evidence of a compulsion on the part of their designers to create a pattern that is systematic and reproducible.
01:05 started by thinking about how humans standardize their surroundings. Right now, we perceive the world through phone screens, so I built the core composition in a portrait 16:9 aspect ratio. Emulating William Morris’ Trellis, I divided up old photographs into a grid to visually describe the idea of how we divide nature. For the trellis, I used a close-up photograph of tree bark. To refer to the division of natural terrain, I used the image of fields, which at first glance appear natural but are entirely curated by humans. I recreated this idea of the juxtaposition of differing nostalgic outlooks as well as an unrealistic expectation of how nature may appear by juxtaposing the clear blue sky and Renaissance architecture in place of the skyline in the field image.
As Trellis was designed to be manufactured and reproduced, I wanted to emulate this in 01:05. I added the off-white strip down the side, which implies that it was to be cut off while still appearing as an additional aesthetic component. Inspired by the same features found in textiles, businesses will use bleeds to advertise their products. I wanted to continue the standardisation theme with this piece but move away from culture and toward logistical systems that could be classified as a type of language.