Bang in the middle of the display ‘A World to Win. Posters of Revolution’ you come across an eye catching hot pink, black and white spotty slogan screenprint that screams out from the gallery ‘There’s A Credit Crunch Not A Creative Crunch’. The creative industries battle cry – designed and printed by Aida Wild.
Aida tells us that the “Credit Crunch” design was made and printed in 2009 in her then shop and studio on Bacon Street in East London. The print was a direct response to the financial and economical crisis that the UK was undergoing at the time and its effects on the creative community and their business’s.
The design was originally made to be part of a wallpaper installation and after some time the remnants of the wallpaper were cut into individual posters, some which were used as paste ups around the streets of Shoreditch. A copy of the print made its way into the V&A’s collection of Prints and Drawings in 2011; a gift from curator Catherine Flood, who has co- curated our current exhibition on Disobedient Objects. It now hangs amongst other prints and posters of this genre in The Paintings Gallery, Room 88.
Aida Wild was born in Iran and arrived in the UK in the mid 80’s as a political refugee. Aida’s artistic career has been a diverse one. She has been a professional screen printer for the last fifteen years, building a hand printed clothing company “Brag” and setting up a boutique and print studio in the heart of Brick Lane, which closed in 2009. She has been an associate lecturer on the Surface Design Program at the London College of Communication for the past 13 years where she gained her degree.
Her unique style expresses her ongoing battle to bring two alternative elements together, the graphic and the classical, whether this is through colour or through image. For the last six years, Aida has been focusing on producing a range of fine art Screen Prints of her artwork, as well as various slogans and iconography “pop” themed artwork that she uses in her outdoor/indoor installation work as well as her print based workshop project titled “Print Is Power”.
Our exclusive “Credit Crunch” screen print is a reproduction of the print in the collection and is a signed opened edition. If you look closely at the video you can see the print hanging on her studio wall.
