Work

Hotel 60

The Miss Sixty fashion group have just opened their first hotel in Riccione, Italy. Foolishly they wanted a room all doodled over…

It started out normal enough, with just a few drawings on the wall, whilst the hotel was still being finished off by the builders.

As the temperature rose in Italy the doodles began to expanded and mulitply.

With mdf dust mixing with the pen ink, it wasn’t long before they were completely out of control.

They ran amok aross all the walls, switches, air vents and even the ceiling.

A bigger, nicer, photo montage of the doodle take over can be found here.

Anyone wanting something similar for their office, lounge, childrens bedroom, massage pallor, drop me a line from here.

This is a short article I have written about the piece for an American magazine:
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Hotel 60 is the first Hotel project by the Miss Sixty group. It’s located in Riccione on the East coast of Italy, which is a popular holiday destination for young Italian hipsters. I travelled to Bologna from London by plane and then caught a train out to the coast. On the train I ate some sandwiches I’d prepared the previous day at home as rural Italy zipped by.

European artists were commissioned to create new works on site in various rooms (I was the sole representative from the UK to be commissioned to do a room). My photos show the room in an unfinished state (note the health and safety defying hanging wires and loose plug sockets). The hotel opened on 19th June, with all the furniture and fittings installed, some of which partially blocked my work.

For the installation I wanted to create a wallpapering of drawings, doodles and scrawls to crawl over the walls, sockets, air conditioning vents and even the ceiling. It would hopefully be an overload of communication, to make up for the frustrations in my inability to successfully communicate to anyone in Italian.

It was a challenge to generate such a vast number of drawings in a short space of time (two days). My brain cut-out after a couple of hours on the first morning, leaving my hand to continue drawing in a frenzied motion. This led to interesting and unexpected results for my work, and captured the essence of what I believe doodling to involve; the lapse in premeditated thought and action.

As the hours rolled past and the natural light faded my drawings became looser and more gestural. The heat swelled and the dusty hotel, now void of its Elton John crooning workmen, who had left for the evening, took on an ominous presence. A half finished building site on the edge of an empty holiday resort. This further influenced my drawings, making them intense in their density. When viewed as broken down elements each doodle could be taken as playful, amassed as a total body they gave the room a menace, like deranged scratches on an asylum cell wall.

Half way into the second day I decided to stop drawing, I was working on the lower ceiling at the time. The mdf dust showering out from the jigsaw in the near by corridor had begun to make my face swell with allegories. My eyes were blurred and red. I took a walk along the beach and saw a small lizard crossing the road. Later that evening I ate some pasta at the hotel I was staying at and struggled to explain to the non-English speaking manager I needed to leave early in the next day. She mimed unlocking the front door and slipping the key back through the letter box, which I mimicked for real the following morning upon my departure.