Art Interviews

The Bin-Gazer of Babylon: Oboe Ngua and the Global Waste Archive

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Some artists search for beauty in sunsets or salvation in the curve of a marble torso. But Oboe Ngua, the world’s only known female bin documentarian, has chosen a different muse: the humble municipal waste receptacle. While others chase light or form, Oboe chases litter. She is on an heroic, and unexpectedly poignant quest—to photograph every bin in the world.

Every. Single. Bin.

Oboe (surname Ngua) began her artistic odyssey sometime in the late 2010s, after what she describes as a “moment of quiet revelation” outside a Little Chef near Loughborough. The sun struck a dented council bin with just the right melancholy—a chiaroscuro of crisp packets and forgotten Monster Munch—and she knew she had found her life’s work. Since then, she has documented over 9,000 bins, across four continents, photographing them with the kind of reverence most reserve for endangered wildlife or church windows.

Her approach is unwavering: one bin, one image, full frontal, unfiltered. No embellishments. Just bin. The results are stark, strangely moving portraits of containers caught somewhere between use and abandonment. Her 2022 show Melancholy Bins of the Danube received critical acclaim, and was promptly banned in Hungary for “aesthetic pessimism.”

Her bins are categorised not only by nation and type—pedal, swing-top, dome-lidded—but also by mood. There are bins of defiance, bins of shame, bins that appear to be whispering something unspeakable into the night. She has spoken, with not a hint of irony, of “the psychological torque of the disused waste bin in Spain.” She refers to landfill sites as “mass graves of late capitalism.” Critics aren’t entirely sure if she’s serious, but she says she is.

Oboe is meticulous. She usually wears gloves. She carries no lighting rig. She once waited four days in a Polish lay-by to snap a recycling bin she had seen on a truck and tracked via Instagram. “It had a story,” she said simply, as if describing a war veteran.

Where most of us see the mundane, Oboe sees monuments to the overlooked. Japanese bins, she tells us, are “modest, a little bashful, with an underlying sense of order.” Italian bins? “Larger than necessary, full of performance, often in relationships with passing pigeons.” English bins? “Perpetually full. Slightly anxious. Trying not to complain.”

To some, her work is a joke stretched to absurdity. But the joke, if there is one and do not forget that she claims there isn’t one, is profound. Duchamp had his urinal. Oboe has the council-issue 240-litre wheelie bin, flanked by crushed Red Bull cans and scented nappy bags. Where Duchamp asked us to rethink sculpture, Oboe asks us to rethink life.

There’s something gently tragic in her quest, too. She knows she’ll never finish. “The world keeps producing rubbish,” she said in a recent panel discussion, “and so I’ll just keep documenting.” When pressed about the futility of the task, she mis-quoted Beckett: “Ever tried harder. Ever failed deeper. No matter. Photograph another bin.”

And so she does. With scissors for tape, a camera for brush, and the courage to look deep into humanity’s polyethylene soul, Oboe gives us a world we’d rather not see—but can’t stop looking at.

Interview with Spen Leopard, collage artist

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Spen Leopard took some time out from collaging the walls of the Queen of Bordeaux’s London residence to speak to us about their career and hopes for the future.

Interviewer (I): Spen, thanks for joining us. To start, tell us a bit about your background.

Spen Leopard (SL): Hello. I grew up in a lighthouse on Scotland’s coast—just me and my parents, who both kept the light burning. That isolation shaped my inner world; for company, I had the crashing waves and my own imagination .

I: That sounds magical. When did you first experiment with collage?

SL: As a child, I’d collect scraps from my parents’ newspaper and old magazines. By my teens I was layering images—boats, birds, torn maps. That formal collage practice didn’t arrive until later, but the habit of curating fragments began in the lighthouse .

I: What themes run through your work?

SL: Central themes are isolation, belonging, and place. Many pieces juxtapose storm-battered nature with human artifacts—ruined piers, handwritten letters, vintage adverts. There’s a tension of fragility and endurance that echoes the lighthouse environment.

I: Walk us through your creative process.

SL: When working non-digitally, I start by gathering ephemera—old postcards, ticket stubs, botanical drawings, bits of text, old menus. Then I lay them onto board, playing with composition until it feels balanced. I glue, layer, and sometimes stitch elements. The result is a textured narrative; each piece reveals stories in the cracks and overlaps.

I: Do you work to a plan or let intuition guide you?

SL: A bit of both. I often begin with a rough idea—a coastal walk or lighthouse motif. But once I’m in the flow—cutting, layering—intuition takes over. It’s like letting the pieces find their own dialogue.

I: How has your upbringing informed your aesthetic?

SL: Living remotely taught me to find value in overlooked details—drip-worn wood on a jetty, a drift seed washed ashore. That attention to detail informs both my material sourcing and my imagery. I want to capture the beauty in the broken and the forgotten.

I: Where do you exhibit your work?

SL: Most recently I had a solo show in Ephesus featuring a nine-piece series called “Beacon Echoes”—all collage-layers of light, rust, shoreline texts. Pimlico Wilde picked up several works and are representing me as well . I’m hoping to exhibit across the UK and beyond in the coming year.

I: What’s next for you?

SL: I’m planning a collaborative series with a poet—combining collage with fragments of marine-inspired verse. I’ll also be sourcing materials from lighthouses across Scotland and Northern England. It’s a way to share both visual and poetic memory.

I: What do you hope viewers take away from your collages?

SL: That art can be woven from small scraps—fragments of time and memory. That there’s poetry in ordinary things if we listen. And that isolation, when deeply attended to, can generate connection.

I: Beautiful. Thanks, Spen, and we look forward to seeing your new work.

SL: Thank you—it’s a pleasure to share a glimpse of my world.

Interview with perambulator Chester Hubble

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An interview with Chester Hubble, instigator of the “Heavy‑Metal, pan‑city, blindfolded perambulations” form of fine art. ****DO NOT IMITATE CHESTER****

Interviewer (I): Chester, thanks for speaking with us. Your current project—walking blindfolded across cities while listening to heavy‑metal podcasts—sounds intense. What draws you to this?

Chester Hubble (CH): Hi, it’s good to be here. I’m fascinated by tension: the clash between freedom and control, the vulnerability of being unsighted in urban environments, and the adrenaline rush of danger—like crossing busy roads blindfolded . The heavy‑metal soundtrack amplifies the emotional rollercoaster.

I: You record the things you “walk into” during these perambulations. Could you explain that process?

CH: At the end of each day I transcribe everything I’ve accidentally walked into—poles, bins, people, dogs, telephone boxes, etc—onto canvas. If I’m injured—say, knocked over by a super‑car on Park Lane, which has happened eleven times—I restart that day’s walk after recovery, so I capture a full consistent record.

I: Wow—knocked over eleven times on one street? How do you manage that risk?

CH: It’s part of my fine art practice. Risk is integral. I used to do free-running, but it needed that extra addition of blindfoldedness. I ensure I can recover and record. If I’m hospitalised, that day’s walk is nullified and retried once I heal.

I: You’re taking these walks across London. What’s your diary like during the project?

CH: Not just London, any city that catches my fancy. Each morning I wake with a strong urge to “feel the city.” I then walk—usually blindfolded—for hours, guided by instinct, heavy‑metal energy, and urban sounds. My diary is sporadic—sometimes a philosophical note before departure, sometimes a simple list after.

I: Are your installations solely the canvases with transcriptions, or does the walk itself function as a performance?

CH: It’s both. The live, unsighted walk through city traffic is the performance. The canvas becomes its physical residue—objectifying all the collisions and near‑misses into something to study and experience vicariously.

I: You mentioned walking on stilts in Camden while blindfolded. What kinds of rituals or props do you use during your walks?

CH: One idea is blindfolded stilts, halfway between absurdity and spectacle. I even hired someone to shout “HE’S NOT MAD, HE’S MAKING ART” at people who get too close.

I: That’s theatrical! What happens if someone intervenes while you’re blind?

CH: Interventions become part of the performance. Someone tries to help, I record that too. The city reacts to my vulnerability—it’s all material.

I: What does your next walk look like?

CH: Tomorrow I’ll be in Southend on Sea. Still blindfolded, maybe on stilts. I’m testing my limits, and the local drivers’ tolerance, again.

I: Finally, what do you hope people take away from your project?

CH: To feel the tension of trust—trusting yourself, the city, and the random. And to see art in hazard: the danger we walk through daily, often unthinking.

I: Thank you, Chester. Best of luck on your next escapade.

CH: Thanks.

Interview with Ptolemy Bognor-Regis: Chasing the Ultimate Painting

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In the shadow of great fortune and brighter genius, Ptolemy Bognor-Regis has emerged as one of the most talked-about figures in contemporary abstract art. The son of a shipping magnate turned media tycoon, Regis might have been content with a life of patronage or leisure—but instead, he’s hurled himself into the center of artistic inquiry with a singular ambition: to create the last painting. The final word. The full stop of the visual age. We sat down with him to discuss his mission, his methods, and the piece he calls “A Bank Robbery in the Environs of Machynlleth.”

Interviewer: Ptolemy, first of all, thank you for making time for this interview. Your latest work is causing a stir—critics have called you “the Rothko of Wales” and it “an act of chromatic violence.” What do you see when you look at A Bank Robbery in the Environs of Machynlleth?

Ptolemy Bognor-Regis:

Thank you. What I see is the inside of a scream—a narrative collapsed into geometry. It’s not a painting of a bank robbery, obviously. It’s a record of the tension before and after such an event. The colour fields are characters. The orange is the alarm. The purple, a kind of communal numbness. The black shapes? They’re decisions, heavy with consequence.

Interviewer: There’s a boldness to your use of negative space. In this piece, the forms press against each other but never quite resolve. Is that intentional?

Regis:

Absolutely. Resolution is the enemy of truth. I’m not here to make peace on canvas—I’m here to expose the war beneath it. The non-resolution is the story. Harmony would be a betrayal of what I’m trying to capture.

Interviewer: You’ve described your artistic goal as “striving after the ultimate painting, after which nothing more can be said.” That’s a monumental ambition. Where does that come from?

Regis:

It comes from impatience, honestly. Impatience with repetition, with the saturation of half-statements in art. I grew up surrounded by enormous wealth, which gave me access—but also a kind of nausea. When everything is possible, meaning becomes slippery. I paint to locate meaning again. To pin it down once and for all, and then be done with it. After the final painting, there should be silence. A holy hush.

Interviewer: That sounds spiritual.

Regis:

It is. But not religious. I think of painting like monastic labor. Endless refinement, shaving away noise, until you hit the essential chord. One brushstroke away from revelation, always.

Interviewer: You’ve said you don’t use assistants, despite having the resources. Why?

Regis:

Because the images record my hesitation, doubt, and triumph. No assistant can fake that. I don’t want a painting that looks clean—I want one that’s wounded. That’s something you have to do yourself. Otherwise it’s merely decoration.

Interviewer: There’s a lot of speculation about your process. Some say you work in total darkness and then assess the result later. Is that true?

Regis (laughs):

Yes. And no. I do draw blind sometimes, but not always in darkness. It’s about trust—trust in the materials, trust in the moment. It’s like holding your breath underwater and waiting for the exact second the body tells you: Now. Draw that.

Interviewer: Looking ahead, do you believe the “final painting” is near?

Regis:

Some days I think I’ve already made it and just haven’t realized. Other days, I think I’m still a thousand lifetimes away. But I’ll keep trying. That’s all I can do.

Interviewer: What’s next for you?

Regis:

Silence. Reading. And perhaps that mythical final work.

A Bank Robbery in the Environs of Machynlleth is currently on view at Pimlico Wilde, London.

Interview: The Art You Can’t See — A Conversation with an Invisibilist

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By Cal Dereau

In a studio somewhere in North London, the artist known only as V sits in front of a completely empty plinth. Or at least, it appears empty. According to her, it isn’t. The work is there. You’re simply not seeing it.

V is one of the key figures in Invisibilism, the whispering-edge movement that’s been described as “a refusal, a disappearance, a spiritual audit of visibility itself.” The movement claims descent from Yves Klein’s invisible zones, Robert Barry’s carrier waves, and all those moments in modernism where the idea eclipsed the object. But Invisibilists go further: they don’t merely imply absence. They insist upon it.

We meet in a space she calls “a non-gallery.” Nothing hangs on the walls.

Q: So to begin—what are we not looking at?

V: You’re looking precisely. That’s enough. The piece is titled Midnight Echo in F Minor. It’s a sculpture made of untreated stillness. The material is attention—strained, focused, then dropped. It took six weeks to make and no tools at all.

Q: Some people say Invisibilism is just conceptual art with a better tailor.

V: That’s unfair. Conceptual art still relies on the idea being tethered to something—an object, a proposition, even a wall label. We untether. We release the idea from even the burden of being legible. The work is not just unseen. It is unsayable. That’s why we don’t do catalogues.

Q: But isn’t there a danger that it’s just… nothing?

V: That is a danger, yes. But nothing is one of the richest mediums available.

Q: Your recent solo show was titled On View: Nothing on View. There was a queue around the block.

V: There was, it was gratifying that people just get Invisibilism. They came to see nothing. And many of them left completely changed. I heard one old man burst into tears for the first time since he was five. Another woman said she suddenly was able to really see her memories. In a way, and this is only one aspect of Invisibilism, we provide the stage for the imagination to hallucinate responsibly.

Q: Your critics accuse Invisibilism of elitism. That it’s the ultimate insider art joke.

V: I think that’s unfair. Picasso was surely having a much bigger joke. But if you’re inside the joke, are you really outside the truth?

Q: Have any institutions tried to buy your work?

V: Yes. The Royal Yorkshire now owns four of my pieces. One of them is installed in their invisible storage area in the Highlands. I’ve never been allowed to visit it.

Q: And commercial galleries?

V: Collectors are are beginning to show an interest in Invisibilism, so galleries are starting to get involved. Your own employer, Pimlico Wilde is one of the bravest galleries and they are having an Invisibilism exhibition soon, which will be grand. Gallerists have generally held back, one told me they were worried because “You can’t insure what you can’t inventory”. But Pimlico Wilde took a chance. They sold an empty vitrine for £180,000. That was my piece Untitled (Tension at 2:13pm). A collector in Geneva is said to have collapsed and cried when she stood near it and had to be carried out on a stretcher.

Q: How do you work, day to day?

V: Mostly I prepare to not make things. It’s a rigorous process. Silence, resistance, withdrawal. I sometimes spend a whole day almost beginning. That’s the studio practice of an Invisibilist. Not doing, with intensity.

Q: Is there a manifesto?

V: There is. But we are arguing over the details,

V: We are working on one. It is hard to agree on what has been decided when nothing is written down.

As I leave, V shows me one last piece. A bare corner. She nods at it reverently.

“That’s Argument Withdrawn, from 2021,” she whispers. “It’s about what’s left when you’ve won but no longer care.”

It’s astonishing. Many of us had not heard of Invisibilism a year ago. Now it is becoming mainstream. Every gallery wants to have an Invisibilist artist on their roster. But none are as committed to this latest -ism as Pimlico Wilde.

INTERVIEW: Salvatore Crump on Pizza, the Mona Lisa, and Why Rugby is the Ultimate Performance Art

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By Ottilie Cardoon

Salvatore Crump is not a man who can be easily summarised. At 92, the Anglo-Neapolitan conceptualist, sculptor, and occasional flautist has staged exhibitions inside blimps, once painted an entire hotel room with marmalade, and remains the only artist to have been shortlisted for both the Turner Prize and the Heineken Cup. Known for his unplaceable accent, exquisite tailoring, and frequent references to failed infrastructure, Crump exudes the clarity of a man who – as a performance piece – once tried to patent silence.

I met him at his studio, a converted abattoir in Toulouse, where the walls were covered in annotated rugby diagrams and pizza crusts lacquered in shellac.

Ottilie Cardoon: Salvatore, thank you for agreeing to speak with me. I hope you don’t mind, but I’d like to begin with the Mona Lisa.

Salvatore Crump: Ah, Lisa. Yes. Of course. I’ve tried to break up with her three times. She just stays in your brain. Like the smell of damp felt.

OC: You’ve said before that you see her not as a painting but as “a psychological riposte.” What did you mean?

SC: People approach her looking for revelation. But she is not a truth-teller. She’s a suggestion. A shrug in oil. She reminds me of my Aunt Cosima’s stare when you’ve done something vaguely disappointing but she hasn’t decided what it is yet. That ambiguity—that is Lisa, no?

OC: And yet, in 2017, you created Postcards from Lisa, a series of works made entirely from Mona Lisa souvenirs found in French petrol stations.

SC: Yes. It was a devotional act, not to her, but to the way she’s been trivialised. You can’t flatten mystery onto a fridge magnet and expect it to behave. I arranged the souvenirs in order of size, and played piano sonatas on them every morning for a month. I could do no more.

OC: Let’s turn—inevitably—to pizza.

SC: Of course.

OC: You’ve spoken of pizza as “the edible readymade.” What role does it play in your practice?

SC: Pizza is composition. Geometry. Improvisation with consequences. The balance of sauce to cheese is not unlike the balance of colour to concept in my early polyethene works. Also, and this is key: every pizza is a personal cosmology. A circular map of desire and limitation.

OC: You once held a three-day symposium titled Crust: Borders and Boundaries.

SC: We invited no one, but still, people came. Neapolitan pizza is a big draw.

OC: Your fascination with rugby seems… unconventional for the art world. Why the obsession?

SC: It’s pure. It’s choreographed violence. It’s mud and grace. I consider it the last great baroque ritual left in Western civilisation. There’s something fundamentally sculptural about the scrum—it’s a moving knot, a living knot. Bernini would have wept, had he been a scrum half.

OC: Do you still play?

SC: I do, but at 92 I fear every game is my last. I no longer play in the front row, that is my concession to age.

OC: What are you working on now?

SC: I’m building a gothic cathedral out of expired boarding passes. It’s called Saint Delay of the Terminal Gate. It’s about transience, repetition, and the essential failure of Western society.

OC: Naturally.

SC: Also, a one-man ballet where I interpret the Eurozone crisis as a series of rugby set-pieces. It is to premiere at the St Ives Opera House.

OC: And finally, Salvatore, what advice would you give to young artists?

SC: Eat everything. Question the sky. No, I mean question everything. And if your work begins to make too much sense, take a step back. Breathe. And maybe put some more anchovies on it!

Crump’s next exhibition, “The Leftover Century,” opens at the Bodega Municipal de São Vicente in September. It is rumoured to include a perfect 3D map of Rome made from lasagna, which will be eaten at the opening party.