Slinkachu’s Little People and Inner City Snails
by Jo Richards
Small is beautiful. Following on from Julian’s theme of little ideas that can be hugely impactful, one of my favourite street artists, the anonymous Slinkachu, fits neatly into this category.
His on-going microscopic street art project, ‘Little People in the City’, is utterly charming in terms of minimal representation of the human condition. Basically, he custom-designs miniature models from train sets and makes them over with modelling clay hoods etc, plus a few props. After putting them in their own real life scenario, interacting with subjects from Big Ben to bird poo, he then leaves his painted creations to fend for themselves in big bad cities. Poor little people. But not before documenting snapshot evidence of their short-lived existence; i.e. until the street-sweeper swish them away. There’s loads of photos on his website and in book, which is delightful. In fact, it was the most interesting artifact I found in the St Ives Tate Gallery at first visit.
I stumbled upon a book recently which I simply had to buy for the sheer inventiveness of the images inside it. Mixing sharp humour with a delicious edge of melancholy, ‘Little people in the city’ brings together the collected photographs of Slinkachu, a street artist who for several years has been leaving little people in the bustling city to fend for themselves, waiting to be discovered.
