Hetty Douglas should join the Labour Party and really belittle the working class
By way of a follow up to the story of Hetty Douglas, the artist who sneakily took the piss out of scaffolders as they all waited in line for a McDonald’s in central London, the victims’ employer has issued a statement. It alerts readers to people, like Hetty, who equate high-vis jackets and steel-toe boot with stupidity. GKR scaffolding also notes that many highly successful businesses have been created by people with few or no academic qualifications – to say nothing of self-taught artists:
Hetty Douglas has now deleted her Instagram account. But her work remains online. As they say, no publicity is bad publicity. Although Hetty may be a little put out that the people she publicly labelled thick are appraising her work and, as the Sun says, finding it wanting. “Too much time on Facebook does this to you,” comes one comment. “Probably done at 5am after a late night,” is another.
Not that Hetty is of the same planet as her critics. On her website, Hetty’s bio presents Hetty in the third person.
Hetty Douglas makes work that represents both the light and dark that comes with simply existing. Douglas simultaneously conveys, subverts and celebrates the complexities of trust, sexual boundaries,and the labyrinth of unspoken intimacies of masculine/feminine truths.
The flippant and challenging textual content of this work is a deeply personal response to past and present relationships. It is obscure and hidden, and thus serves its unintentional purpose – to provoke an exploration of sincere emotions.
Underneath the tantalising layers of Douglas’s work lies a clear pursuit for something that truly matters – astable place and a true identity in a world that can happily chew you up, spit you out and not think twice about it.
Can Hetty turn adversity to her advantage? After all, the best bit of this story is that her Instagram photo is the most artful thing she’s produced. A series is surely in the offing, in which Hetty gets to the essence of what it is to exist today with a series of images in which she derides not only workmen, but also bankers, grammar school children, men on trains, the fat, smokers and Essex men. She should find a ready market for her stuff in the Labour Party.
Posted: 8th, September 2017 | In: Key Posts, News Comment | TrackBack | Permalink