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.

Artworks
Publications
Articles
Websites

About

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.

Artworks
Publications
Articles
Websites

About
Chinese Whispers,

Digital Collage, 2021

Chinese Whispers is a from-memory floorplan of a secondary school computer room. This piece revisits personal memories of hopelessly copying the work of others, and ultimately inhibiting my own learning.

The layout of the computer room would facilitate a string of copying between those who knew what they were doing, and those who did not.

This work is a visual metaphor for the origins of my own insecurities, and how my inability to use basic computer software was born out of my desire to copy rather than to learn things for myself.



︎    I purposefully positioned all student-related components of the image (seats, computers, mice, keyboards, screens) on either a vertical or horizontal axis to represent the controlled and regulated circumstances they operated in, such as their rigid day-to-day timetable.

All teacher-related components (binders, piles of papers, laptop, swivel chair, whiteboard-connected computer, etc.) are positioned at random angles, to represent the more freeform, albeit at times still highly regulated, daily schedule of a teacher.

Chinese Whispers serves as an encapsulation of my insecurities surrounding my ability to use various computer software, as well as my emotional and nostalgic feelings surrounding my time at secondary school. This idea shapes my motivation to produce the work that I do.