I'm here today with more questions and answers. I'm at that period in my life where I'm trying
to figure out what the way is in my life and who I am and where I'm going and is there
a difference between a person and an artist. A lot of people say to me, I really love
to meet the real you, the real you outside of the art, the real you outside of the creation.
It's very difficult for me to see a difference between the two. There's a way that I started
to ask myself, who am I? It started on the back of my bedroom door. This is the back
of my bedroom door and I have multiples of the question, who are you, who are you, who
are you? Every time I leave my bedroom, every time I leave my house, every time I wake up,
I see this question and it makes me think about who am I, am I being me, who do I wish
to be? We'll scoot over here and you'll see a picture of me behind the mask of my
art. The two have started to blur together. When I talk at conferences, I usually like
to start with a picture that goes back to the beginning of who I am before the art,
before the creation. You'll see this is a picture of me and my brothers and sisters
and you can guess which one is me. That's me. I'm proud to say my Michael Jackson's
shorts there. I'm not adopted. I wasn't found on the street. I just happened to have a
different dad to my brothers and sisters, which meant that I started out in life with
a bigger afro than the rest of my family. At the time, of course, it was a little difficult
and I would see that I was different to everyone else, but now that I have the privilege of reflection,
I see that this gave me my passport or my advantage in life. Unlike my brothers and
sisters, they were all made to fit in. They had that peer pressure to fit in with everyone
else. When you look different, as soon as you step outside of your family home, people
treat you differently. I grew up in a place called Thames Meads, which is in South East
London. Some of you may have seen that a little bit because it's filmed in Clockwork
Orange a little bit and more recently, so, a TV show called Misfits. The thing about
Thames Meads is it's in South East London and it's one of these. It was meant to be
a utopia state with people with money and without money and all different backgrounds living
together. But actually what happened is it happened to be a thing called a sinker state.
People had problem families in different kind of estates around the country in London.
They all ended up here. You can imagine what kind of place that ended up being. For me,
it was a big playground. We could climb up these flats and everything was off the ground.
Everything was on ground level because we were close to the Thames, the River Thames. They
built everything a level up. It was a big playground for me growing up. I got very
good at climbing and jumping off of things. That was fun. Growing up here also strengthened
me being an individual. It was very white, very working class. If you're slightly tanned
with an afro, you have those different challenges to the rest of your family when you leave your
house. I kind of expressed myself or I found the way that I could express myself was through
drawing, was through art, through creating my own kind of worlds and realities. I would
draw faces as a kid and give them names and superpowers. These would be my friends and
my escape from where I grew up. That eventually led me to a place called Central St Martin's.
There's a big story in between, but that would take too long. I ended up at a place called
Central St Martin's in London. This really opened up my eyes. There was a lot of people
from different backgrounds, different incomes, and we all really learned to work together
and collaborate. At the time, when I was 19, 20, 21, my work was still a little bit dark
and still trying to get rid of all those things about growing up. My work at the time was
a little unhappy. This was a character of mine called Hangman. It had a little heart
and sometimes Hangman would have a briefcase. The idea is Hangman was a businessman that
cut himself loose from a noose and was kind of travelling the world and being unhappy.
I think that was a little bit of me at the time. When I graduated St Martin's in 2003,
I got on a nice little plane and I headed to Japan. I was interested in Japan and Japanese
culture because at St Martin's, there was a lot of Japanese students. I became that
kid that hung out with all the Japanese kids and had sushi five times a week and saw all
the Japanese movies and collected toys. I really had a connection with Japan. In 2003,
I moved there. I found that some of the work that I was doing in the UK at the time wouldn't
have been fitting because a lot of it was graffiti and on walls and tagging. I would have got
in big trouble if I did that in Japan. What happened is that I started to draw a lot
smaller using very, very fine pens, like a 0.05 pen, which meant that the pen was so
fine that I would have to be this close when I was drawing to see the paper. Some of the
drawing that I did there, it became a lot finer and a lot delicate. There's still this
mixture of cute and monsters. One thing about living in Japan, it made me okay with things
being cute. When you live in London, growing up in London, there's something anti-cute
about it. When you go to Japan, everything is cute and that had an effect on me and
my drawing. Even though it was still a little unhappy or dark in a way, it adapted
to this cute factor. Here's some drawing. You've got these different characters carrying
little hangbags and holes in their heads and flowers in their pockets and bears in
your pocket. That was really nice. I found that I could escape into the drawing like
I did as a kid. I started to do some live visuals in clubs in Japan. It started in
more avant-garde places. I would take my sketchbook and draw under a camcorder. That feed would
be projected on the screen. I would do live drawn visuals, sometimes using my hand and
magnifying glasses and moving it around. Here you go. Here's a picture of my hands
and the pen at the time. Sometimes I would use post-it notes that were fun. You could
interact with people and dancers. I'm going to show a very quick video of what that looked
like. The fun thing about this, and accidentally ending up in this world in Japan of doing
visuals in the avant-garde scene, is that I really discovered that there's a whole
genre of music that I had no interest in or didn't really like, but it really helped
the drawing because you need to switch off in a way. We're going to run a video clip
to show you an example of some of that first music I would draw to. I'm going to talk
to the sky. Let's run video one.
This is the type of music I ended up drawing to. That happened because people, a friend
at the time, saw some of this type of drawing that I was doing and said, hey, can you do
some visuals at my event or my party? I said yes, but the drawing I'm doing is so small
and intimate. Let's draw under a camcorder. That's how that all came to be. Over time,
I went from more of the analogue to digital, so using computers and drawing tablets and
drawing more to DJs and dancers and musicians. Sometimes I would experiment. I guess this
is around 2004 or 2005, but I would experiment with using multiple computers and tablets.
Here you can see I tried to use my left hand and my right hand. That wasn't a very good
idea because that's what the left hand looked like. Even drawing to musicians. We're going
to run a second video clip, which is an example of the later kind of digital stuff that I
was doing. Video two. You can see here also that there's two screens. There's a screen
at the front and a screen at the back. I was also experimenting again with drawing
with my left hand and my right hand. The screen hidden in the back doesn't move that fast
either because that's my left hand. The great thing about this is transitioning from the
more analogue stuff into the light stuff is that I realised that I was also a dancer.
You have these guys dancing here in front, but I'll also be behind drawing just as fast
as they would be dancing and moving around and drawing more layers. It just really builds
up, which is fun. Let's turn the volume up a little bit. Okay, let's cut that. I found
myself in a place where it's really exciting. I'm drawing here and zooming out, moving around
and you can move the canvas around. If the crowd went, you can write, zoom in, zoom out.
What I discovered at this time is that, hey, I'm a performer. There's something really
special about working spontaneously and working in real time. The funny thing would be in
Japan, fans would come up to me at the end of shows and be like, hey, can you sign me?
That turned into a whole collaboration of drawing on my fans and drawing all over their face.
Sometimes with permanent pens, sometimes not. It got to about, I think I lived in Japan
from 2003 into 2008. Towards the end of 2008, I started to feel like I needed to go somewhere
else, like my life was making a change. I knew that I wouldn't live in Japan forever.
I didn't know if it would be one year, 10 years, 50 years, but one day I woke up and
I said, okay, I want a change. I want to move. I made the mistake, or maybe not mistake,
of going to New York for a holiday. Anyone that goes to New York for a holiday for a
first time, you get there, you love it. Oh, my God, this place is amazing. I'm going to
move here. I went to New York for a holiday, loved it, got an artist visa. A few months
later, I moved there in 2008. Probably not the best time to move to New York either.
When I got there, I was like, oh, crap. Yes, New York has everything, but not if you
move from Tokyo. In Tokyo or in Japan, there's a huge sense of technology and collaboration
and a cultural experience or expectation for visuals. What happened is moving to New
York, I ended up not doing the digital stuff as much, but picking up pens and drawing
on objects and on walls, but still in a very much the spontaneous, live way. When I draw,
there's usually an audience. The audience usually drives me to create these bigger installations
or drawings. That's a lot of what I've been doing now as well. The great thing about this
is I pick up the pen and I'll just draw. I'm going to run a third video. I'm going
to talk a little bit about the process of the drawing. Let's run video free. When I'm
drawing, there's initially this white big piece of paper, which at first was very intimidating
for me. Now I've discovered that there's so much freedom and potential in a white canvas
or any canvas. I usually start with a big fluid movement and just drawing and just
trying to fill up the paper as much as possible. Creating the foundations of the future. I don't
really know where the pen's going. The pen knows where it's going and I just follow. I've
got very good at listening to the pen and following. Here you'll see me follow, follow. If there's
a bump in the wall, maybe that'll take me to another place. If the pen goes blank, then
we do some dashes. Then I'll step back and look to see if there's any kind of smoother
lines in the drawing. If there's a smoother line, I draw a nose and then a mouth and eyes
because that looks like a face. I'll go through and draw all these faces. It's funny how the
conference one day, someone asked me, why do all your eyes look left? I said, oh, they
don't all look left. Then I stood back and looked at some past drawings and I said, oh,
they all look left. I'm still trying to figure out some of what these ideas or symbols or
language means when I draw them. If there's an angle that's more like a triangle, I draw
a birds beak and if there's a birds beak, you need an eye. For me, words and drawing are
the same thing. It's very spontaneous. It's all lines and you'll see that within the
work. Then when I'm drawing, I'm so close to the paper so that when I step back, it's
always a surprise to me that it works because I never really know what I'm drawing until
it's finished. Sometimes people ask me, how do I plan out my composition? I say I don't.
It just happens. Every time I do, it's a surprise. There we go. Let's go back. There's something
really nice about the expectations or the not knowing where you're going. Someone pointed
out or actually a few people pointed out to me that my drawings look like maps. I started
to think of myself like that. I myself am at all. I'm mapping out where I'm going through
my drawing. Sometimes when I step back from my drawings, they look so big and confident
like they already existed or they always existed. I'm just finding a way of pulling them into
a place where we can see them. It's very interesting to me to look back at some of the characters
now and some of the words within my work and start to try and figure out what they mean
to me. Something I draw a lot is an eye like this. An eye with lots of raffles. There you
go. There's one there. I started to go back and pull out the meaning or behind the language
of what some of these mean. For example, the eye. I had a look and decided what does
that mean? For me, eye has always existed in the world, but she was not always open,
let alone aware and responsive. A singular string of events led eye to the practice of
meditation which helped her become much more accepting of the new experiences and more
responsive towards the world at large. Now, well, this new openness is visually manifest
in the smooth, regally shaped flower eyelashes that now frame eye. I also look back at some
of those past drawings that I did or those past characters. The one that I showed you
at the beginning, headless, this is what headless means to me. Headless used to get lots of
headaches and was extremely troubled, let's go back, by the past in an attempt to escape
all this, he cut off his head, but quickly realised that the shadow of his past was
still firmly attached. Headless is now on a journey to find peace with his shadow. I
feel like that was me at the beginning of my journey. That was me trying to figure
out who I was and who I am. Now I've become more like the eye. I've become more interested
in accepting the idea that my art and me are the same. As the beginning I showed you the
way or who are you, now I just celebrate yay. Kind of you are you. I'm enjoying it and it's
a great journey. Everyone, please enjoy the yay and celebrate that you are you. Thank
you very much.
