>> ADAM DANT: The location of my studio has always been crucial to the kind of work I
have produced.
It has always been very important to me that I am in a space that is suffused with history,
tradition and the inherent conflicts within when we are looking at the modern world and
social and economic developments.
The kinds of stories that attract me are always anecdotal, humorous and redolent of something
greater.
We are in my studio on Club Row, Shoreditch, east London, just on the fringes of the City
– the financial heart of Britain.
My name is Adam Dant.
I am a fine artist working in the graphic tradition.
As a printmaking student at the Royal College of Art, the kinds of prints that attracted
me were the popular prints: the things that were spewed out there in the street.
They were there one day; they were gone the next.
Another reason why I love having my studio next to the City of London is that the work
I do has direct roots in the activities of the coffee houses and the trading there.
I think the tradition within which I am working is one of the grand narrative, whereby the
viewer is drawn into a series of stories that I have knitted together as an encyclopaedic
compendia of the information I glean through sketchbooks in the street.
I usually work on a very large scale on huge sheets of paper that I will stretch up on
a large drawing board in my workshop.
I will gather together all of my research material from libraries, archives and from
sketching directly from life in the street.
All I have at my disposal is a brush and a bottle of ink.
Because the materials I am working with are the same materials that an artist would have
used in the 18th century, I am aware I am in the 21st century, and conceptually engaging
with the past is a 21st century activity.
The drawings seem to be not timeless but not of a specific area, so I like to see them
as existing not in the past, not in the present and not in the future; they are floating somewhere
else.
The work I have been commissioned to make for Westminster involves several areas of
research.
One is going to involve me travelling up and down the country with my sketchbook to key
marginal seats and to events of national significance, which may or may not be connected to the general
election.
Another part of my research will be in libraries and archives, where I like to try to, especially
with the geographic aspect of the general election, find historical parallels to what
is happening now.
I do not work as an editorial cartoonist, so the grist to my mill is not the slip-ups
and the mistakes that politicians make; it is more just the zeitgeist of the moment.
The advantage I have over the press and broadcast media is I do not have to find a story.
I just have to depict what I find.
There is an element of occasionally being in the right place at the right time.
For me, the general election is going to be all about the electorate.
It is about their fears: whether MPs can provide them with reassurance.
It is about the economy and it is about the reality of that in the lives in the electorate.
I think the finished work will be a picture of Britain in its entirety.
I want it to be a coherent and cogent view of who we are as political beings now.