Artist Jack Hirons has launched his latest show on a wing and a prayer – making all his own paint from the burnt bones of fried chicken he bought on his way to watch Spurs.
His show, at the OOF Gallery in the club’s north London ground, includes around a dozen paintings inspired by football, fast food and religion.
Hirons, who is based in Margate, started collecting leftover bones from his takeaways in 2017 and turns them into charcoal on a camping stove in his back garden before adding the ashes to linseed oil to make the paint.
He has used the result – a stark black paint – to create images of chickens and even a huge stained glass window that doubles as a chicken shop menu.
The 31-year-old, whose previous work includes video art showing how a solid bar of silver becomes silver nitrate and is then made into film, said the idea for this show came over a drink.
He said: “I was literally sat in the pub and my friend was telling me how he had just been reading about how many chicken wings get eaten during the Superbowl weekend and seeing all these numbers blew my mind a little bit.
“As a Spurs fan myself I wear this top with a cockerel on it and I pass all these cockerels and there is this weird thing that plays out right opposite the ground where you’ve got a chicken shop with a chicken logo on it and opposite you’ve got the stadium and it’s this weird paradoxical relationship”.
:The show runs at the OOF Gallery, N17, to May 11.
