Reveal — Skate Culture

Analyse a surface and reveal the detail hidden in it, using two graphic and media design processes running alongside each other. The outcome could be digital, physical or both.

The surface I picked was a fingerboard, a tiny skateboard I bought after I broke my ankle and couldn't skate properly, and kept long after I stopped playing with it. What's underneath it isn't really a material, it's something handed down: skating came to me from my dad's childhood. So the reveal ended up being about digging that up rather than the grip tape.

I did the research at the skate park, on shop walls full of decks, and through old skate print. Two years hold the work together, 1940 and 1970, when the culture appeared and when it peaked, and they run across the posters as huge cut numerals. The materials do most of the talking. I photographed scrap wood, maple ply, asphalt and grip tape and used them as flood backgrounds with the type knocked out of them, and took the colour straight from old skate magazines. The phrases are the ones the culture keeps saying about itself: REBELLION, FREEDOM, IT'S NOT JUST A SPORT, IT'S A LIFESTYLE.

For the second process I brought it back to an object. Instead of leaving the printed stuff flat I cut the posters up and collaged them onto a shoe, since that's the surface skaters actually wreck. I made it as an exhibition piece, so it reads as a poster from across the room and as a worn-out artefact when you get close.

A poster series and a collaged shoe, meant to be shown together.