96 To Go: Sweating the Small Stuff
Artist ‘96 To Go’ is bringing a whole new layer of grime to the small world of model miniatures
Do you remember going to a toy shop, back in the day, and seeing the train-set rolling around the tiny model village, and most of the time there was a note saying ‘Please do not touch’? Well, our featured artist in this edition has taken model-making to a whole new, urban-decay-led level... and is almost certainly one of the kids at whom that sign was aimed.
The Isle of Sheppey’s Jerome White, better known as ‘96 To Go’, has been honing his miniature muck and perfecting his diddy discarded cigarette butts to design life-like re-creations of some of Kent’s grubby hot-spots.
“It is the love of grime, in a way,” he says. “I quite like walking down the street and seeing what people have thrown out. Or how people put their own mark on an area, whether that be through graffiti tags or someone sticking a poster on a door. I love seeing posters for gigs on disused doors. That draws me in.”
From the empty former Woolworths in Margate High Street to boarded-up kebab shops and even abandoned petrol stations, 96 To Go is putting a unique stamp on the world of the diorama.
“I actually got it from my grandad,” says Jerome. “He worked at the Victoria & Albert Museum and used to sometimes make the train-sets for the kids’ museum back in the 70s and 80s.
“It is the love of grime, in a way. I quite like walking down the street and seeing what people have thrown out”
“When we would go to his house he had a spare room full of train-sets and a 1930s city. It was also films and television, like Robocop, which was the first step into miniatures for me.”
A passion for Aardman Animations – the people behind Wallace & Gromit and Chicken Run – at school was where Jerome started developing his own skills for creating miniatures, wanting to make props for stop-motion films and television.
But it was upon arriving at the University for Creative Arts in Canterbury where the artist found his niche.
“Everyone on the fine-art course was doing paintings and sculpture, and I had this niche of model-making. And I also liked looking at abandoned buildings, so I decided to mesh the two together. I thought, rather than just photograph the buildings, why not make them so people can view them in a 3D space.”
BEFORE IT’S GONE
Using urban mess as a muse was always quite likely to grab attention – baby bin-bags and tiddly chewing gum aren’t often the focus of fascination. But rather than an ode to the eyesore, 96 To Go’s work is actually a documentation of history born out of a fascination for defacement.
“I made a piece a few years ago of a chip-shop down in Margate, near the hospital, and Santus Circus had gone through and plastered it with posters, not even a foot apart from each other,” he explains. “That drew me in. It’s how people just stick stuff on disused places and the way the weather is hitting it as well and destroying the place that intrigues me. You never know how long a building will last, it could get renovated or condemned. It’s catching it in the moment.”
Just like in his scaled-down (usually in 1:12 Dolls House Scale) re-creations, it is the finer details that catch the eye when picking a location to re-create.
“It’s probably the layers of paint that draws me in most,” he says. “Seeing things chip away, revealing layer by layer the different years, when something was repainted, is really interesting to me.
“If the place is boarded up or falling apart, that gets me. I’m a history person, it’s always a part of the things I do, and it’s very much part of things I want to do in the future, too.”
Following a number of successful exhibitions and some crazy commissions (see the French château that he was asked to re-create), Jerome’s next project will see him take a nostalgic focus on bedrooms of a bygone era… namely the 80s, 90s and 00s.
“It’s a collection of nostalgia pieces playing on our youth and highlighting the things that would have been in kids’ bedrooms at the time. There’s a play on Toys R Us and Woolworths and all the places you’d go and get your stuff.”
At 24, Jerome assures us he does remember Woolworths, but the rest may need a deep dive through Google.
“I was born in 1996 [hence the name 96 To Go], so for the stuff I’m going to be making I wasn’t even around for most of it. It will be some proper research for this show.”
The collection will be available at the Paxton + Glew gallery in Brighton, which already works closely with 96 To Go, selling a number of his individual works, which you can see on his website and social media... but be warned, it’s not always easy to know which is the photograph and which is the artwork.
“That’s my aim,” he says. “I want people to think that the piece is the real place. The closer it is, the better I’ve done my job. That’s how I see it. I want it to be as close as possible when I bring it to the gallery space.”
WEB: 96togo.co.uk/
INSTA: @96togo