Chip and Bean Buy Nothing

I first discovered Simone Lia 12 years ago when together with Tom Gauld and friends she created and curated a billboard exhibition in South East London called Happiness In Brockley. Bored with fifty foot adverts trying to sell us cigarettes and new cars as we walked to the station and into town everyday she had decided to challenge and change their use and, for just a short time, to give them a new purpose – just to make us smile.

And it did. Not only were the artists involved super-talented and the work really nice but the project really connected with people. When we walked through the streets filled with this living exhibition of life and love we just felt, perhaps for the first time, that we were being addressed as a community not as a bunch of consumers. And that made a nice change.

Simone and I both still live in Brockley and although her work is now more frequently seen at Tate Britain than in the streets of South East London it still comes from that same place. Always intended to make you smile, her surreal and super-cute characters like Fluffy The Rabbit or Chip and Bean often ask some pretty profound questions about the world around us, and so also make us think about the way we live and what’s important.

It’s easy to be seduced by super-models, film stars and celebrities selling us the dream of consumption 24 hours a day, persuading us that bigger, better, faster, newer stuff is what we need to be happy. But a Chip and a Bean sitting on a log on Hilly Fields know better.

And so do we.

You can see Simone’s work on her website: www.simonelia.com

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