Description

In arguably its most challenging and thought provoking form, this version of ‘Anatomy of a politician’ has been designed to be a uniquely ongoing and evolving work of art.

The starting point was a sense of being overwhelmed by the deluge of political promises made by politicians of all parties in the run-up to the 2015 general election. Even without the educated commentary of the political pundits, it was obvious that many of these promises would be broken within days, weeks or months of any party coming to power, such is the two-faced nature of politics in this day and age.

And so ‘Anatomy of a politician’ was conceptually born but what it took to come to fruition was the idea of turning a complete anatomical skeleton into an Airfix model kit design, with the subtle addition of a second skull to indicate two faces. Each individual bone was hand traced from a turn of the century medical drawing and then rearranged into the Airfix model design you see here.

For this particular version, we collated newspaper headlines and clippings of the election coverage into an A1 collage which we photographed and used as the basis of a background. We overlaid this onto the design ensuring that key ‘promises’ were visible, printed it and then painstakingly cut the design, as ever, completely by hand. The twist with this version is that we used our studio proofing printer to print the original design on matt archival paper. What this means is that over the years, the print colour will gradually fade, just like the promises and pledges which they represent, ultimately leaving the bones bleached white.

Signed by the artists, ‘Anatomy of a politician’ is a genuine 1/1 original hand cut, papercut, back mounted on archival quality mountboard and framed in in a black, custom-made solid wood box frame.

Framed dimensions: 625 mm (w) x 870 mm (h)