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| Feature by Roller :: Tuesday, August 03, 2004 |
| SN has a quick little chat with Jet-Pac to find out what he's up to these days... |
| Introduce your self. Where you from? How long have you been making stickers? Where you living now? This is a bit like 'speed dating' isn't it? Anyway, I 'm originally from a small town in the Central belt of Scotland but now I live in North Yorkshire in England. Like a lot of my friends I moved south for work about 3 years ago. I 've been making stickers of varying quality for about 5 years but I studied sculpture at art school so I guess you could say I’ve been making public art for nearer ten years. Do you work or study? I work at the art school in Leeds, which is great in terms of the facilities, and the enthusiasm in the college. How’s the scene in your city? What other street artists are repping' over there? Fair enough, York is a city (it's got a Cathedral and all), but it isn't huge and it's only in the past year or so that more stickers have started to appear around town. Mostly I go out on my own or with my friends they in Manchester. Where are some of your favorite spots to hit up? The centre of town's always good 'cos it feels like you're making a dent and people notice what your up to, regardless of whether they love it or hate it. But nothing lasts that long in town. I don’t know if that's because my works getting binned or stuck on skateboards -although I have noticed lately that some of it's getting repositioned. I don't really know what to make of that. Do you participate in any art shows/ instalments? In the past year or two there seems to be a lot more street art/sticker/whatever-you-wanna-call-it shows going up. I don't think that's such a bad thing so long as you're still working the streets and getting up in the great outdoors. So yeah I’m usually up for that kind of action, last month I went to NYC for the opening of the Hollywood remix organised by woostercollective.com. I 've also got some work in the group show at the Mass Gallery of Contemporary art through GBGC and earlier this year I had a joint show at the Porthouse Gallery in Manchester with Mike Clark of color your city fame. Have you ever been in trouble with the authorities? Never had any real bother to be honest. I don't mess with them, they don't mess with me! Years ago, Sleepyvalley and me got stopped in Edinburgh by the FEDs, but when they found out we were art students they just laugh at us and told us to piss off. That was a good 8 or 9 years ago. I expect you'd get a different response these days. What other cities/ countries have you spread your artwork? I 'm pretty much always up for a sticker swap so courtesy of a few kind likeminded peeps. I’ve done okay in my quest for world-wide domination. Mau in Portugal, Bo130 in Milan, Rep1, Dave, RobotsWillKill,Horsie & Abe Lincoln Jr. in America, Chun1 in Bangkok, Shn, Khristo, FeFe in Brazil, Doubledevil, Sumo in Luxembourg, Biou in Greece, JustinKees, Ewos & MikeClark in Holland, Flotte in Switzerland, Koralie, Supakitch & Eko in France and so many more. It's one of the best things about the scene that everyone is so generous with their work and time. Do you have any good tricks you want to share with the readers? I recently bought a Gecco home screen printing kit in NYC and it rocks! It's only A5 but it allows you to expose positives and print (in editions of up to 100-ish) using permanent inks. So far I’ve not had terrific results with vinyl, but I’m not done experimenting. For screen-printing quality without huge amounts of facilities I think it's a winner. Do you make/sell any merchandise? If not, do you plan to? For my American trip I made a limited run of 80 sticker packs, which I gave away though some people seemed to think I could've sold them. And over the past couple of weeks I’ve been putting together a small (28 page) artist's book to hopefully the same sort of production values. The Gecco has raised the possibility of screen printed T-shirts, but I don't think I’m organised enough to run a small company. Realistically I imagine all of this stuff will end up in being swapped in sticker packs. Where do you want to take your art in the future? I loose interest with specific characters and styles pretty quickly so it's safe to say that it'll just keep changing. The nice thing about that is I get to resurrect old designs and team them up with new work, which helps to keep me interested. At the moment I’m doing quite a lot of paste-ups and working hard on my drawing again (for the first time in years). Seeing The London Police, Galo and Mysterious Al in action in NYC was pretty inspiring. Favorite artists? I 've been lucky enough to swap stickers with and/or meet many of the people I rate. Artists like PMH, D*Face, Flying Fortress, Dist, Vinnie Ray, Jet & Rubble, You Are Beautiful, Ezba, Kuildoosh, Shewville, So Fuzzy Crew, Jon Burgerman. And not forgetting all the artists I’ve already mentioned and loads more that I’ll think of as soon as it's too late... If Montana were to make a color for you, what color would it be and what would it be called? Baby Toy-pac...a kinda duck egg blue colour. If you could design a Kubric toy, what would it look like? Now you’re talking! It'd be a 3D pixelated version of me...I’m an ego manic. Favorite thing to do on your spare time? Hang out with my girlfriend... Want to give any shout outs to anyone? All the people I 've already mentioned and of course my family and my girlfriend Clare, sorry about all the nights infront of the TV listening to me cutting stickers... Thanks! No, thankyou... |
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