“If we wanna do something and they’re trying to take opportunities away from us then we’ll just make it ourselves. I’m part of an art collective called the Greedy Anorexics. I basically try and do everything but I love illustration. I went from illustration to painting, and then digital artwork and print making. I do acting, modelling, I write poetry, I do photography, and I dabble in other stuff, like music videos. College only teaches you fine art, so I’m basically self-taught. I’ve got a short attention span so I always wanna do new things, and then if there’s signs that I can do it well I’ll keep going and try and do it better.
Other than art I do dance. I dance for Urban Essence. My sister started it as a local group that practised in Space, the community college. It was just eight of us, then it grew into a company and now there’s sixty four. It’s mainly street dance, like breaking and popping and all that like hiphop elements, but then she mixes it in with contemporary and ballet, like she gives us training in all the areas that we would kind of need. We’ve done music videos, tours, won competitions and stuff like that, and she lets us teach the class below, and then she lets those dancers teach the class below that so we all get experience teaching.
I love Shoreditch. It’s a lot more free than most areas that you see in Hackney, and there’s a community for street art here. If you just walk up from my house to Shoreditch High Street you’ll see eight or nine pieces by different artists. It keeps me wanting to create more. There is a rough side, like where you can kind of see it’s still Hackney. Luckily my family kept me away from it, but there’s people I went primary school with that are in prison now, just because they got involved with the wrong crowd. My sisters, they kept me busy. Whenever they saw I was good something they made me do more of it. I never really wanted to go out, I’d rather just stay in and draw. Or my sister would come home and she’d be like, show me this move or that move and I’d wanna show them, like I wanna be good to them, so they kinda kept me off that path. Especially with dance taking me on like tours and stuff. Like you’re backstage and there’s a massive crowd and it’s like, wow. Then you get back and you see people you went to primary school with on street corners, and you’re thinking, like you haven’t really seen anything, you’re kind of stuck here, just doing the same thing. The world’s a big place, and my sisters and my brothers helped me see it and that’s really cool.
The collective started out in August and we’ve been doing like mad amounts of work. It’s really weird because, it’s like the gallery world, they’re really unwelcoming of new artists, especially because we’re young. They’re really snooty and it’s like, ah, just move man, just let me do something. This woman from Selfridges came to our college, that does the window displays, and I was like, I wanna be in the window. So we talked to her and we convinced her and we’re booked in. That happened on a whim, but it’s simply because she’s given us the chance to do it that it’s really taking off for us. Like, I was worried about the cuts, but then I realised I wasn’t getting no money from art, I was funding myself. If they’re cutting back it doesn’t mean you have to stop. That’s why we have the collective. I think the harder artists work, the more the government might say, ok, you guys are doing something, here’s some money. But until then, you just gotta keep going, you can’t stop.
