Shit Alphabet | 2015

These drawings were made during a time I was without a studio. To keep working, I gave myself two rules: make a drawing every day, and anything, no matter how silly, could be the subject of a drawing. Often, I didn’t know what to draw. One day, at a loss for a subject, I drew my own poop. And actually the poop was interesting as it had beautiful contorted shapes and unexpected contours when I looked at it closely. After a few days of drawing, I noticed that I was creating letters. So I decided to draw the whole alphabet. Every morning I would wake up and after breakfast go to the toilet to see what letter I could produce that day. It took me almost 5 months to produce all the letters. In Shit Alphabet, there are 25 letters and only words without an M can be written.

None of the letters have been tampered with, I drew them exactly as they appeared in the toilet bowl. As I assembled the alphabet, it dawned on me that a piece that began with a purely playful intention had some intriguing and rather subversive implications. Shit Alphabet was drawn with a great sense of playfulness, linking a basic childlike bodily curiosity, excrement and one of the most highly evolved characteristics of human beings, that of language.

Work in private collection.