East End graffiti artist Cyclops, has become an ubiquitous part of London’s trendy East. It’s hard to turn a corner without being presented with his trademark one-eyed Charlie-Brown or toothy grin. But, judging by his latest exhibition of fine art light-boxes and political badges, London’s favourite graffiti artist has grown up.


Jesus Help Me Find My Proper Place, marks Price’s ascension from a life on the streets to one of the UK’s bestselling artists from a graffiti background. Expelled at 15 for daubing the school with graffiti, he later experienced homelessness, drug addiction and jail on two continents. Five years after having kicked his addiction, Price’s much-lauded street and fine art has been recognised by critics, media and buyers the world over, and his works debuted to critical acclaim at auction last year, with pieces including Cease to Exist commanding £15K. So, why am I looking at a series of fine art photographs…

“When I started making work for this show, I wanted to make something like a film, or a rambling collage ― a film that had been paused. I wanted to make an entirely new body of work that drew less on graffiti and explored some of the other ideas that interest me. If I’m saying anything, it’s quite abstract. I’m into people making up their own minds about what the work means,” Cyclops’ alter ego Lucas Price tells Mooks.

So are we meant to see this as an exploration of the new, and a goodbye to the past? After all, the artist himself has experienced some of the themes of the show – homelessness, drug abuse – is it a retrospective to get it out of his system and start afresh?

“It’s not explicitly autobiographical,” Price says. “It’s like making a film and using some half-remembered conversation and turning it into something new. So there are things I’ve seen or heard, and decided that it would be good to turn that thing, whatever it might be, into a  piece. It’s like a cover version of a ghostwritten song about a film. When I started working on the show, I found some footage of David Lynch giving a talk about his creative process amongst other things, and he answers a woman who’s asking him about the meaning of Mulholland Drive and she says that she really doesn’t get it. And his answer to me is so perfect. He says that he doesn’t know why, but that sometimes he falls in love with an idea and that he just has to make it, and maybe much later on he will understand what the meaning is. So he doesn’t necessarily know what he’s saying, which was good to hear, because I’m not always sure ― I just know there’s an idea I want to explore.”

Jesus Help Me Find My Proper Place runs at The Black Rat Press October 15 until November 13.




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