>Anonymous Shopping (Outside)_2026
Bent UV print on aluminium


+ Anonymous Shopping (Inside)_2026
Bent UV print on aluminium

Two bent aluminium works, with printed scan from Douglas Coupland book Shopping In Jail, 2013 with eye holes cut creating a comical anonymity-device (It was Coupland's first novel 'Generation X', that popularized the term).

These works come from scans of collections of things I’ve found – paper, postcards, pages from books, lottery tickets, foil from chocolate coins and stickers – I like how they were used, and carried the marks from that use. Pages underlined, folded, and forgotten. Then digitised by me, and printed onto aluminium – where they are manipulated, bent, cut, and drilled through. Giving permanence to something fragile.

When I made this work I was thinking about anonymity devices. When I do, I always think of comical anonymity devices, like that from cartoons, or comedy films, where eyeholes would be cut into a book so you can view upon a scene anonymously. I’ not sure where I’d seen it, maybe from Jacques Tati films or The Pink Panther. It’s always a bit funny, but also allows you to talk about surveillance in a way that doesn’t become too serious, and that’s really important if you want people to think with the work.

I remember a story my dad told me from when he used to work as a music journalist for Kerrang! Magazine in the early 2000’s. He’d been asked to write the script for the singer of Slipknot for an awards ceremony. The band are famous for wearing full-face masks, but unluckily for Corey, the singer of the band, his mask hadn’t made it through UK customs. Their fix was to cut two eye holes into a big brown paper bag and send him out onstage. I think my dad actually kept hold of the bag somewhere. I thought that was really great, and stupid, and funny, and it might have more of a part to play in making these works than Jacques Tati or The Pink Panther.

Both works, Anonymous Shopping (Outside) + Anonymous Shopping (Inside), are currently on show at Haninge Konsthall as part of Krona Eller Klave?, Stockholm (Sweden) until the 10th May 2026. You can see some more about Krona Eller Klave? if you click on this link.

I think anonymity devices are quite relevant to the internet today, where people act in ways that would never be acceptable IRL, there’s also a synergy to another work in the show Look Diego It’s A Painting Of Now where the film documents the relationship between myself and a South African YouTuber who I’d anonymously posted paintings to.

A bit more on anonymity devices (& shifting function):

Here’s an example I wrote about before — If we take a small stone for instance: what could this be? Between 2019 – 2020, students in Hong Kong’s protests bestowed a new function of the upmost importance on the humble stone – it became; an anonymity device.

Each day they would place a different stone in one of their shoes to alter their way of walking, disguising their unconscious movements (gate) to evade identification from surveillance software that was developed after people began to cover their faces at protests.

This simple allocation of function, to the small stone, was able to trick the authorities and sabotage their advanced technological systems’ ability to function in the recognition and categorization of people. The stone became an anonymity device because the technology treated the body as a data-producing object. It became like a mask to the systems patten recognition. Showing that, the things that make up our day to day reality aren’t fixed, they are malleable.“There is a subjectivity that routes the whole structure of objectivity, of our everyday experience.” Even within systems of control, there is always space for change. 

I have been interested in the idea of poiêsis — “The process by which something comes into existence that did not exist before. It represents the act of making, producing, or transforming, shifting from non-being to being, encompassing both art and natural production.” 

A bestowing of function, or act of invention, although destabilizing can be transformative. It can show reality for what it truly is – structured, contingent, and haunted by spectators of the past that continue to inform the present.  





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Here are some photos of them in that exhibition — it should be noted the gallery wall is off-white/gray.

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