UPDATE: I had an error in this article. Pure Evil tells me that Lister bought a comic or two featuring The Joker right before hearing of Ledger’s death. Not a tabloid magazine. The photo that Lister used for his painting was found at a different time.
Here’s the second of my artist profiles based on the Saints and Sinners show at the St. Martin’s Lane Hotel.
Walking around Shoreditch and Hackney, Pure Evil’s work is almost impossible to ignore. He is undoubtedly one of London’s most prolific street artists, both in how much of his work is on the streets, and how varied the work can be.
PE’s work stems from a fear that something is just going wrong is the world. “I just kinda have this sense of a shit-storm coming, you know, all the time,” he said. In part due to this sense of impending doom, he spends much time researching its potential causes: from the power of multi-national corporations to Milton Friedman’s economic theories and groups like the Illuminati. When his reactions to his research emerge in his work, PE says they often get mixed up and come out as a sort of hodgepodge of fears.
Much of PE’s work parodies or plays on pop culture gone wrong. “I’m trying to summon the dark side of popular culture,” he said.
The PE persona comes from some of his early childhood experiences. When he was young, he would spend time with his cousins in the countryside. PE’s cousins had a lot of guns, and he used to walk around the countryside with guns strapped to his body. One day, his cousins gave him a shotgun and let him go out hunting for small game. While he was out, he “saw some rabbits and shot them,” said PE. “I didn’t think anything of it and then walked over and there was actually a rabbit that had been shot, and it’s that kind of thing where you go ‘what does that actually gain?’” Killing the rabbit made PE realize that death is real and that it can come so easily from something as simple as a gun. “[The Pure Evil tag is] the idea that this rabbit that I killed is now sort of undead and coming back to haunt me.” Continue reading “What Is Pure Evil?”
