Who we are and the point of what we are doing...  

As final year Solent Illustration students, we find ourselves approaching the end of our time at University; and this means the Final Degree Show is approaching. In addition to having a degree show in Southampton, we also organise a more accessible London exhibition show for potential clients to visit. In order to showcase our work in London, we have to raise enough capital to fund it ourselves. With this in mind, we organise events and fund-raising opportunities throughout the academic year.

This February we produced work to display at the Bargate Monument Gallery, Southampton for which, we organised, curated and supervised the entire exhibition ourselves. It ran from the 13th to the 19th February and was a sell out show. We hope to continue this success with our Pointless Posters Exhibition in partnership with Johnny Toaster - Johnny Toaster’s generous support of the Solent Illustration course has given Southampton’s growing creative community the opportunity to see the creative outputs of the final year students.

The Point of a Pointless Poster...

The idea of Pointless Posters is to create an image of any sort with, as the title suggests, no obvious reason, meaning or message. In doing so it creates a sort of contradictory object. A poster is meant to give us some sort of information - i.e directions to a location or details of an upcoming event. To create a meaningless poster however, that renders these traditional uses obsolete is an interesting thought.

We are surrounded by posters on a daily basis, constantly relaying information to us, forcing it into our lives whether invited or not. So much of the information can also be irrelevant to the viewer, it may have no connection to them and in this way the meaning becomes void and lost. Pointless Posters plays on this idea by creating posters that are intended to say nothing to the spectator, and in this way they are left to try and decode the images - images which ultimately will have them making analyses for no reason. The viewer often tries to ‘read’ into pieces of art and find the artist’s intention. Even if sometimes their conclusion may be far from the actual meaning, the spectator is often rewarded with a sense of satisfaction. This decoding of a hidden meaning may be thought to be achieved with Pointless Posters but ultimately, it is an ill-fated motion of dissection. The spectator is working for nothing; they are the donkey chasing the carrot on the stick.

Each poster is an individual interpretation by each artist of what a Pointless Poster is. Every poster is a single colour screen print on the same variety of paper; this ensures a continuity and unified theme throughout. The use of screen printing reinforces the ideology of posters with their immediacy and ability to be mass-produced.

Final Point...

Amongst us, a huge array of styles are exhibited: ranging from more traditional print-makers to the diagrammatic artist, we are typographers and paper-cutters and everything in between; this exhibition showcases this diversity and heralds it.

Joe Staples & Nate Kitch
BA (Hons) Illustration 3rd Year

Featured Images by: Kelvin Dutton and Ken Iizuka.