Conceptual Overview
Nuclear Sale! captures a disused billboard overtaken by nature, with peeling text that still screams EVERYTHING MUST GO! . Behind it, the blurred image of an explosion – flickers through the decay. The piece plays with the brutal absurdity of retail slogans when recontextualised in a setting of apparent catastrophe.
The work echoes a language we’re conditioned to respond to – urgency, clearance, finality – but now detached from any functioning economy. The consumer is absent. The sale has passed. What remains is the detritus of desire.
Material and Visual Strategy
This piece continues my exploration into discarded commercial environments. In this piece I have dropped the mannequin – a recurring proxy for the human subject and I have focussed more on the context of the language.
The surface of the billboard is distressed and cracked; it’s not a fresh intervention, but an old broadcast still clinging to relevance. The surrounding vegetation adds to the sense of entropy and nature’s quiet reclamation.
The piece is designed as a site-responsive proposal, suited to installation on abandoned retail or commercial structures. It engages the environment to amplify its message: that the marketplace continues to echo, even when the audience is gone.
Reflection
Nuclear Sale! consolidates themes I’ve already worked through in Central Line and other installations: the collapse of identity into commerce, the haunting persistence of marketing language, the aesthetics of abandonment.
What’s different here is the removal of the body. The mannequin is missing, and with it, the intermediary between viewer and message. This absence allows the work to shift fully into aftermath. It’s not a portrait of commodified life, but a landscape after it – an image where desire has outlived the desirer.
This piece helps clarify how visual strategies like decay, erasure, and repetition operate in my practice – not just as formal gestures, but as conceptual tools. I’m becoming increasingly interested in the space where communication breaks down: when the advert no longer works, but still won’t go away.