I was commissioned to make a limited edition poster on the occasion of artist Yuen Fong Ling’s exhibition, ‘We are the Monument’, at Sheffield Museums. Yuen spent a 15 month residency in the museums’ archives, culminating with an exhibition he curated. For the exhibition, Yuen also made a series of films of performances that use his mobile plinth and which engage with the city’s permanent collection.

The large format A1 poster folds out from A3 quarters. The reverse side features an essay by Dave Beech that adds context to Yuen’s work and the exhibition.

Yuen’s mobile plinth is part performance space, part public engagement and part protest. It is prompted by when and where it goes and who it encounters.

The design is based on a plinth used to display the bust of Edward Carpenter, by artist Dorothea Clement, which is in Sheffield Museums’ permanent collection. Scaled up, the plinth becomes a proposal for the public to step up on the structure and ‘be the monument’.

Because Yuen was using archive material from Sheffield Museums’ permanent collection as the foundation of the show, the posters also needed to reflect the deep-rooted history of the institution.

The answer came when we noticed some of the original door signage in the Graves Gallery: a quite brutal, modernist, slightly weathered typeface that was hidden in plain sight.

I drew a full alphabet based on the simple proportions of the “PULL” and “PUSH” letter forms. From there, I could now make a special new plinth glyph based on the new typeface dimensions. This was drawn to match Yuen’s plinth and, in turn, Dorothea Clement’s Edward Carpenter bust.

Importantly, as part of his practice, Yuen pulls and pushes his mobile plinth around the city. This makes the posters situational to Sheffield Museums and to Graves Gallery’s history, illustrative of the performative act of Yuen moving his plinth, and also instructional for opening and unfolding the poster.

The quarter and half folds play an important part in how the poster works. The bottom half of the poster works as a mobile plinth in its own right. It is designed to be held or stuck up underneath surrounding images or objects, inviting the viewer to question or think about what is highlighted on the plinth.


See Yuen below: