London artist Toby Mott, renowned for significant contributions to punk visual culture such as his 2023 Wall of Noise exhibition at Saatchi Gallery, is planning to give similar treatment to fetish culture from the 1980s onwards with a new exhibition and book project, for which he is seeking donations of printed items such as flyers, posters and clothing catalogues.
With a career spanning several decades, Mott's artistic endeavors traverse themes of rebellion, counterculture, deviance, and transgression across various mediums, including painting, publishing, and installation. His story since the early ’80s includes friendships with cultural innovators such as Marilyn, Princess Julia and Boy George; heading the Grey Organisation that carried out paint attacks on Cork Street art galleries, and embracing Malcolm McLaren’s dictum of turning chaos into cash.
Top image: Detail from promotional PDF produced by Toby Mott, inviting contributions to his fetish exhibition and book project
Full view, left, of page 1 of Toby Mott’s promo PDF for the fetish exhibition and book. Right: the London artist himself
He appeared in several arthouse films by British director Derek Jarman — notably The Angelic Conversation — and also featured in works by Gilbert and George. He produced visuals for the likes of De La Soul and Public Enemy and, in the late ’90s, launched his own fashion line, Toby Pimlico, specialising in slogan t-shirts. More recently, Mott founded the international publishing fair Cultural Traffic, serving as a platform for social change through DIY practice.
The new fetish project is, for Toby Mott, a logical follow-up to last year’s Wall of Noise exhibition, which evolved from his habit of collecting punk culture posters, flyers, and fanzines since the start of that cultural phenomenon. This early ad hoc archiving evolved into The Mott Collection, an expansive personal archive of British subcultural ephemera encompassing various movements such as new wave, post-punk, Northern Irish punk, anarcho-punk, skinhead, new romantic, warehouse, sound system, queer, acid house, rave, and jungle. The collection has subsequently formed the basis of several acclaimed publications and exhibitions.
Detail from Toby Mott’s 2023 exhibition Wall of Noise at London’s Saatchi Gallery, featuring printed cultural ephemera from the punk era
Now Mott wants to turn his attention to fetish culture, aiming to document the “rich history of the fetish, queer and transgressive scene from the 1980s onwards”. He plans to “curate a comprehensive exhibition and accompanying book, focusing on the vibrant paper ephemera that defined the era before the advent of the Internet”.
Toby believes there must be many fans of fetish culture from the last four decades who will have collected such ephemera themselves, and who could potentially play a crucial role in this project, by contributing items that would help him create “a vivid and authentic portrayal of the community and its creative outputs”. Such contributions would not only be invaluable to the exhibition and book, he believes, but would also “help ensure that this significant cultural history is preserved for future generations”.
The artist with slogans in three sizes from his Detention Lines series, hand drawn in black ink on brightly painted Indian Khadi cotton rag paper
If you have any printed materials of this kind that you could consider donating to the project, Mott would love to hear from you. He promises any such support will be greatly appreciated and everyone who donates items that he uses will be duly acknowledged in the exhibition and publication.
For more information or to contribute items, contact Toby Mott at:
[email protected]
and view his work at:
culturaltraffic.com
facebook.com/tobymott
Full-width view of Toby’s large Wall of Noise collage exhibited at London’s Saatchi Gallery in 2023