YOURLOCALPUB(LICATION)
Your Local Pub(lication) is an independent small press created by Brad Gilbert and Michael Caplan. We want to be a resource for small artists and designers who don’t always have good options to start publishing collections of their work. We aim to release a new artists work monthly.
Currently Featured:
Nelson Diplexcito
Brad Gilbert
Gabriel Gayle
Jungwon Jay Hur
Liam HartUpcoming Features:
Michael Caplan
Mataio Austin Dean
Kay Liang
Ula Taylor Reilly
Michelle Lim
Jos Nyreen
If you would like to propose a project, please get in touch!
Email
Instagram
01 HUMPTY DUMPTYLIAM HART
HUMPTY DUMPTY
Published in 2024
Perfect Bound
148mm x 211mm
EDITION OF 50
Humpty Dumpty is a publication by Liam Hart that explores modern England. The photographs are from between 2013-2023 from every corner of the country.
It’s a playful exploration of English identity and its fragility and fragmenting nature. It’s hard to agree on anything in our current time but regardless of your political views or social standing, one thing is agreed: England is broken. It’s the one universal truth we have in a time when truth feels the least universal thing possible. 2013-2023 is a point in our history in which this universal truth came to exist. Through austerity, Brexit, a pandemic and a change in monarch, what was once bubbling under the surface is flying high like a flag in the summer of a World Cup.
Using the universally known rhyme of Humpty Dumpty I look to personify the country and simplify our predicament. We fell down and we lay broken on the floor. The layout speaks to this very idea, the photographs are fragments of this country taped back together. Furthermore, the tape is used to resemble the very thing that represents and divides us, the flag.
The project was born from the flag. When I used to see it, it made me feel deeply uncomfortable. It had come to represent something far from its purpose. A nationalistic tool. Like our predicament with being broken, this isn’t something we can run from or ignore. If we are to be put together again then we must start to reclaim these things. It’s in this subversive nature that I use the flag.
This ultimately is the message of the project, we must be put back together again. But maybe it’s not the kings horses or kings men that do this, maybe it’s us, each other.