Artist: Richard Shields

Size: 4.5inch x 3.5inch'As Lockdown fell across Great Britain the curtain raised on the greatest pantomime in modern history. The public clapped for the NHS heroes and booed their neighbours for not joining in. I watched people in Madrid perform Opera on the balcony, DJ’s in Berlin, live-streamed techno sets from their roof tops and here in Britain, shoppers stripped their local Tesco of toilet roll and pasta whilst whistling ‘We'll meet again’. The spirit of WWII was championed by the press as the furloughed public pumped cash into Amazon, Wish and Deliveroo.

To celebrate this moment in British History I have produced a limited edition piece titled ‘A Nation Of Shoppers'. Miniature shopping trolleys stacked with hand sculpted and painted porcelain toilet rolls'.

Artist Biography

Richard Shields claims to be undertaking a residency in his own life. Shields invokes personal experiences affecting a wider cross section of society. The struggle for success, embracing failure, permo anxiety, Googling your ill health, dancing with debt, and identity all feature in Shields work. A relationship with the viewer is built through familiarity in objects and the site specific. These concerns inform painting, drawing and sculpture, encompassing realism and abstraction.

Shields has recently employed Italian theatre and opera, paramilitary myth making, social media, found objects and traditional skills to create performance based exhibitions leaving audiences amused, disturbed and spiritually awoken. Website

Postage: £10, Royal Mail Recorded Delivery

*Order by the 16th of December to receive in time for Christmas

Photography by studio member Steve Iles.