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With regular urban signs the meaning of the message is reinforced by the minimalist quality of the letters and the space around them. By breaking up the words and tightly composing the letters into a rectangle, these works shift between the readable and the abstract as we look at them. So I guess they retain something, which is familiar to the city dweller, but they have, as you say, dissolved somewhat into pattern. Alternatively, they address the conditions we live in, not the world of things.
By stacking and compressing the letters together within the composition I hoped to suggest city centre architecture and how it feels to be surrounded by it. This was more acute in the bas-reliefs you mentioned but I think the prints carry that in them too – they borrow from the pallet of road signs, red, black, white, green and blue. I certainly worked with a reductive approach for these works, which probably helped to suggest a modernist sensibility.
– Kenny Hunter in an interview with Susannah Thompson, from his 2008 book ‘A Shout In The Street’
