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
A sentimental observation of a longstanding cutting mat Reproduced in combination with other collected elements, this image serves as an example of a true representation of the artistic process.
Refusing to hide or gloss over any evidence of its composition, this piece contests the way established flags tend to embellish or misportray their respective nations in a way that makes them appear better than they are.
︎ I’ve owned this cutting mat for about 5 years. In my last work on the PAPERplus flag, I think what attracted me to creating that piece the most was the pre-existing lines that were indented into the material I was working on. This made conceptualising my flag significantly easier because I had a rough guideline to follow. I think that attraction is also pervasive in my work on this cutting mat. It already has some flag-like features, such as a rectangular shape, a minimal and coherent colour palette, and clearly defined sections. I didn’t want to do too much with the design of the cutting mat but simply channel its features into a medium that I had recent experience with to familiarise myself with its composition.
The canvas is composed of a white piece of cardboard recovered from an IKEA print backing card, which was originally used to keep graphic prints flat. The only identifiable feature of this is the small "IKEA CARD" text that was printed on the back. In my recreation of my cutting mat onto this material, I avoided this motif so that it was still clear in the final design. My work is about clear representation, and I would be doing a disservice to my theoretical work if I were to erase or hide the exact source of the composition.
I marked out the grid on this card with my home-made tri-square and worked into it with green and dark green oil pastels. This was a mistake in retrospect, as I had assumed that in all my years of ownership of this cutting mat, it was two shades of green. I was shocked to find that when I sampled the colour palette in Photoshop, it was a combination of green and blue instead.
This process of physically recreating my work in oil pastel before doing the digital render allows me to avoid just going for the first idea in my head right away. The process is time-intensive, which allows me to think about what more I could do with my work and develop a deeper understanding of how the cutting mat looks rather than just how I think it looks.
In the final digital render of my cutting mat, I combined both elements of the cutting mat and the IKEA cardboard into the overall aesthetic. I maintained a 3:5 ratio at 2100 x 3500 pixels. While this was not completely accurate to the size and proportion of the original material components and influences, all the visual elements of the piece are present and visible.