The Artist Exploring Northern Working-Class Cultural Identity

sees Slinger combine deeply emotive imagery from the UK miners’ strikes of the 1980s with collectible paraphernalia from popular culture in a number of mixed media works. While the fusion of these two strands of visual culture may appear crass at a glance, the artist explains that there is a more meaningful relationship in these works than in the majority of botched representations of working-class culture presented to us in mainstream art, photography and film.

“I’m a little bit tired of images of the working class and how it has been attached to trash and insignificance. It’s like, ‘oh, look at this painting of a Mars bar’ – isn’t it saying it’s working class because working class poor people eat shit? Isn’t that hilarious?” They continue, “I want to separate it from the idea of cultural working class to actually significant events within the history of labour – and I don’t mean the political party.

Talking about the role of memorabilia in their work, they suggest that their own neglected wants and childhood desires have bled into their artistic psyche. “For a while, I didn’t quite understand the relationship between what I wanted to buy for myself and what I wanted to buy for my art practice. It’s still blurred. A very blurred boundary where I’ll buy something to make something out of it and then I like it so much that I can’t do anything [with it].

Attachment and detachment are themes that dominate our conversation – one conducted over Zoom, in a time when my visiting the UK hasn’t been possible for almost a year and a half due to living in Germany and Slinger is unable to attend their show in Germany due to being confined to the UK. When I ask why they chose now to bring this body of work to life, it’s a sense of confused trauma and nostalgia that rises to the surface.

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