This time we’ve produced a super tight limited-edition collection for you with the help of renowned image wizard Stephen Ellcock, using his book England on Fire as inspiration. Stephen has the magical ability of pulling together seemingly disparate images from history and presenting them in such a way that they sing off the same hymn sheet.
Curated by Stephen and with texts by Mat Osman, the book explores English Art, but not as you know it:
'England on Fire is a visual journey through Albion's psychic landscape,
It is a book, in part, about English art. Two words that together strike fear into all but the most backward looking, flag-shagging hearts, But England on Fire is a book about English art that is like no other, starting where other books end. In the wild corners and the forgotten lanes. Among the dispossessed, the forgotten and the excluded.
Here is an Albion unhinged, a haunted, wild, anarchic realm, where magic and rebellion are the dark undercurrents that fuel the nation’s collective imagination.
In place of a the usual tired rogues’ gallery of Lords and Ladies; of endless panoramas of hedgerows, stiles and spires; of bloodless recreations of brutal history and dark, disquieting myth; of country-house and bonnet porn; of an endless parade of forelock-tugging yeomen and comely milkmaids; of cherubic chimney sweeps and factory girls, of urchins and under-butlers; of rich men in their castles and poor men at their gates, England on Fire presents a portrait of Albion that is radical , inclusive, riotous and untamed.
The book is a kaleidoscopic fantasia of mayhem and magic, protest and provocation, rural nightmares and urban utopias, terminal decline and future dreaming, the shock of the old and the thrill of the new.
An antidote to post -imperialist pessimism, nostalgia and navel-gazing, England on Fire offers a vision of a new land – an enchanted, enchanting, maddening, quickening, furious, funny and fabulous England. An England on fire …’
© Mat Osman and Stephen Ellcock , 2022 -2024
Published by Watkins Publishing , 2022