Drake's Diary

Our Collaboration with Adam Dant

Today we’re moving our new Spring collection into Clifford Street. We’re also hanging internationally acclaimed, Jerwood prize winning artist Adam Dant’s ‘The Dissolution of the Call Centre’, 2009!

Here Adam explains where the idea for this series of drawings came from:

‘I purchased The Book of Revolutions, for a few pounds from a homeless man who had laid it out, along with various other tatty volumes to sell, on a piece of cardboard in the pavement outside a Tesco store.  The Book of Revolutions,’ was designed as a handsome coffee table book, lavishly illustrated in full colour, depicting the history of insurrection and regime change.
My copy however, was stained, dirty; and when I opened it I discovered that most of the best pictures had been oddly snipped out. This damage appears to have been done either as an act of sabotage, or more emphatically, censorship.  The possibility exists that the prior owner either removed the images which contained uncomfortable depictions of terrifying social upheavals, or, just as likely, a possible interloper could have cut them out, motivated by the preposterous notion that visual representations of social struggle should not be used to adorn a domestic bourgeois salon of the upper middle classes.  This thought played upon my mind until it developed into a theme for my most recent drawings, prints, maps and pamphlets. By creating notional ‘missing pictures’ for The Book of Revolutions, I would like to embody the dramatic appeal of the methods and language of ‘noble’ and ‘romantic’ causes, in a manner that incorporates the mundane, debilitating and unvarnished aspects of day to day existence.’

As many of you will know when we opened our shop last May we commissioned Adam to illustrate our Clerkenwell factory. It’s an amazing visual journey around our world of tie making and for those of you who haven’t already seen it this is Adam’s drawing. It resides in the old Natural History Museum starfish cabinet we have in Clifford Street.