Foraged sticks and toy guns replace the earlier advances of Foz Foster’s toy soldiers to combat the beauty, the pain, intensity and bittersweet moments of shared joy of domestic life, family, love, grief, loss, friendship, hope and optimism.
The starting point for this body of work is Foster’s use of ‘found sticks from local walks’ to create imagined guns’ as subjects. Repurposing childhood games, toys, cutting up key texts such 1970’s Battle comics, The Bible, the London Metro, 1990’s Viz comic and 1980’s Shoot magazine, and improvised-play as materials, tools and strategies for making art, are all recurring motifs in Foster’s work.
Exhibition Details:
Event Dates: 1-6 May | 10 AM - 5 PM (6th May until 12 PM)
Private Views: Thursday 1 May | 6-9 PM
Location: Gallery 1, The Handbag Factory, 3 Loughborough St, London SE11 5RB
‘As a fanatical Action Man lover in the 1970’s, I played pretend battles with friends. If I didn’t have a toy gun, I picked up a stick , if it was small it was a pistol, if it was long it was a rifle or if it had knobbly bits on, it was a tommy gun…..ratatatttttar!!!! No one died in these battles, maybe only through laughter and excitement.’ —(Foz Foster, 2025)
The experiences of ‘fun and games’ provides access points to enter into the vastly complex, large-scale, immersive works on paper. Three years on, and the beads in the kaleidoscope have got smaller. The visual images more complex, the textual messages more urgent, as concepts, experiences and thoughts flicker and fight to compete to been seen, heard, received and understood.
Scale also plays an essential part of this collections work, both as a context for artistic activity and as a physical document of the exhaustible amount of time and, at times, obsessive effort taken to create the work. Again, scale is decided on as part of Foster’s ‘war-play-art-making-strategy’, as he explains:
‘Scale has always inspired me, from 30ft high Chairman Mao prints by Warhol, in the Hayward Gallery Exhibition in the late 1980’s, positioning me as a micro viewer, to the Death Star in Star Wars, to Indian miniature paintings. I love how scale positions the viewer. You can draw people in or get them to stand back. My Action Man Scorpion tank was the greatest and largest Christmas present I got as a very young kid, it’s scale under the tree, it was as big as me….so exciting.’
The life size Scorpion tank work was directly inspired by this, and is formed from a composite of twelve, 137cm x 101 cm images forming a grid of 4 x 3 to create my ‘life tank’.
This fascination with scale continues with his drawing implements, from scalpels to various sized wall paper scrapers, giving both control and crudeness when he scratches away the sweeping brush applied paint to reveal the wax crayon surface helping him reveal visual surprise, accidents and points of departure with opportunities to create. The visual surprise counters the importance of inspirational boredom. Boredom in the 1970’s was the inspiration of creativity.
For Foster, this exhibition celebrates what we are all going through in our own ‘every days’, some joyful or calmer, some more awful and some more complex. We all have our own weapons, and tanks.
Foster (b.1968) Graduated from Central St Martin (MA) in 1991, awarded an Honorary Fellowship by HCA 2014 for his contribution to the arts and is based in London. To date, he has had 12 solo-shows most recent of which include,’ Home Front: ‘2022 —Kaleidoscope of the Mundane’, ’2016 - Love Dad X, Free Space gallery, London’, ‘2015 - Labour of Love, Camden Image Gallery, London’ and ‘2011 - Resurrections, Metropolitan Community Church, New York.’ In addition, he has been commissioned by Liberty, London Fashion Week and South Bank Centre to produce large-scale public artworks, as well as The Guardian, The Independent, Saatchi & Saatchi and The BBC.