VERB SKATEBOARDS X Alice Edy
What music were you listening to while you were
creating your graphics for the Verb range?
I was listening to audio-books. It’s like watching TV
and reading at the same time, but with your ears.
Did you have any formal art education, or are you
self-taught?
I studied Fine Art, but it’s way harder un-learning the
self-flagellation and assorted neuroses that come with
that degree. It took a while to even like art again, postinstitution. That shit will kill you, make no mistake.
Could you briefly explain the process you went
through in creating this work?
Paging through loads of medical books and collecting
verbs that I thought were interesting... You did say
“briefly”.
Who are some of the artists whose work you enjoy ortake inspiration from?
Monaux, Diane Victor, Johannes Phokela, Jeremy Fish,Maja and Gerard Marks
What was your inspiration or the idea behind your
Verb design?
I love words and language (which made a project
like Verb so exciting) and I wanted this project to be
linguistic as well as visual. I like the idea of mixing
words and images because ultimately they are both
just specific arrangements of marks that create signs
we are conditioned to interpret in certain ways. A
scribble can say something in one language and
nothing in another. Value is a construct that you put
on something, not an intrinsic feature in something.
The the drawn marks both create and are represented
by the diagrammatic illustrations of body parts – our
physicality is worthless if we don’t use our bodies/
minds to create our own meaning.
What sort of full-time work do you do currently? Are
there any other projects you’re involved with at the
moment?
My attention span hasn’t allowed for anything
full-time yet. I have been doing bits and pieces of
jobs over the last year (some involved in illustration,
some not) and drawing as much as possible in my
own time. My best non-art job was being a tour guide
over the summer on the big, red, open-top London
buses. I apologise to anyone who had to sit through
my tour, which consisted mostly of bad jokes and
spontaneously fabricated “facts”. Plus, I got to wear a
sweet uniform.
What sorts of mediums do you work in and what do
you enjoy about it?
Ink... Drawing and calligraphy. I enjoy having to focus intensely on something and working with my hands and brain at once and I love how it feels to makesomething. I love pictures. I need to have dirty hands.
