Some artists make work and stop there. Others can’t. The same instinct that drives them to cut and paste drives them to build platforms, edit zines, organise shows, pull other artists into the conversation. It’s not strategy. It’s the same curiosity running in a different direction. Phil Scott and Bill Noir both know this. So do we.
Phil Scott told his careers advisor he wanted to play when he grew up. That answer turned out to be more considered than it sounded — he spent four years at LEGO Design teaching 350+ designers about Learning through Play, and now applies those same principles to collage and curation. His process, Find, Cut & Paste, extends what Hannah Höch and John Heartfield started: taking the media and propaganda used to control public opinion and turning it back on itself. But Scott adds structure to the chaos. Rules that open the work rather than close it down.
In this interview, he talks about why Dada without constraints is just noise, what playful curation actually looks like inside a gallery, and what happens when you give a room full of international artists a simple brief and no fixed outcome. The answer, as with most things Phil Scott does, involves a lot of trust in the process.
“If you know what the outcome looks like at the beginning, something has gone wrong in the creative process.”
We first spoke with Bill Noir back in 2019, when he was already ten years into running Mékanik Copulaire — a French collage platform that had by then produced over thirty printed editions, each between 100 and 300 copies. What struck us then, and still does, is how he describes his curatorial practice: not as a programme or a position, but as a selfish act of collecting. Building his own archive. Sharing his fascination. Being, in his words, the ferryman.
The connection to Phil Scott is direct. Both of them run curatorial projects that are inseparable from how they make their own work. Both are drawn to the non-narrative, the unexpected, the thing that surprises them before they can explain why. And both would probably laugh at the idea that any of it is separable from just being an artist who can’t stop being curious.
“It is also a purely selfish act of collecting, namely, to establish my own archives.”
We made this t-shirt because we wanted one. That’s the honest version.
The design adapts the 1924 cover of La Révolution Surréaliste — replacing the original Surrealists with the six artists of TWS Editions: James Gallagher, Fred Free, Cless, Charles Wilkin, Rubén B., and Max-o-matic. It started as a joke between people who’ve been building this thing together for fifteen years, without institutional backing, without asking permission, and mostly just because we believed the work deserved a platform.
That’s also why we’re still here. The same reason Phil Scott can’t stop curating. The same reason Bill Noir keeps working on his own and collective projects. You do it because the curiosity is genuine and the community that forms around it turns out to be real.
Limited edition of 50. A few are still available.
Stay Weird
Curiosity is the project. Everything else follows.
— The Weird Show
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