Free posters
At Indy Prints, we have spent much of the last year or so creating artwork that celebrates Scottish culture, language and scenery. However Indy Prints began in Scottish politics and with a frighteningly divisive general election looking, we have made a slight return to dark field. Read on to find out more…
We live in a country with a frighteningly monochromatic media. There is a vast spectrum of information and opinion available across the world, yet in the UK we are presented with a tiny sliver from one end of that spectrum and are made to believe this sliver is the whole.
I have rarely seen my opinions and ideas represented in the media. They’re from a different part of the spectrum, the part we see out of our windows and when chatting with friends: a reality not seen on the screens and pages of the corporate media.
When the indyref happened we found new ways like Bella Caledonia to talk to each other, bypassing partly the established means. I found my voice making graphics to share online, a practice I continue to this day. It is my way of trying to spread ideas and information that the corporate media won’t or can’t – yet it is limited to only those who see my social media feed.
Many of us will remember how well the Yes campaign won the online argument and how that in itself was not enough. Without real world equivalents, there is only so much that we can do.
Earlier this year, I marched in the streets with self-made signs and realised that – of course – social media graphics are the modern parallel of the political posters of the past. I wondered how my graphics could leak into the real world as actual posters.
The answer was simple: I put them online as free poster downloads.
With the council elections past and the general election looming like an unknown light deep in a long tunnel, I’ve stepped up a gear in the production of my graphics, creating messages I believe offer a counter narrative to that of the corporate media and the UK establishment.
I hope that everyone reading this will take the opportunity to grab a free political poster and – responsibly – post it in the real world. It’s going to take all of us working together to make our world better. My little part in that task right now is to make drawings. Perhaps yours could be sticking them to walls.
– Stewart Bremner