Hidy Thing

Its been about 5 or 6 months since I began minting nfts.

Not creating them specifically for this purpose, but minting existing things we’d already made in this new digital way.

Animations made through lockdown, in collaboration with Samantha Whates and as idents for The Chill Out Tent; created for fun, escapism, connection with our friends, as markers of that strange special Spring.

They will always be close to my heart, some of the work I am most proud of making, totems of those things we missed, things we noted, and things we noticed.

Seeing things as if afresh; birthdays, pancakes, catkins, daisies. The small and the mundane, the deep and the special. Some specific nods to culture we loved: the mirrorball at Pikes: Samantha channelling some deep Harvey dub from the murky æther, or Lake Ennio, bittersweet requiem to the maestro’s passing.

Or bees, textbook bees, doing their beautiful humble alchemical work of living, regardless of our human foibles.

By the time I’d managed to figure out how to mint our Hidents, it was September 2021, our seasonal sigils so oddly of their moment, now felt out of sync, muted, playing catchup. As our gifs sat looping, unseen and unlistened, HEN took a beat. Things seem to stop for a moment, mutate, demarcate. Ancient human patterns seemed to swirl.

And now we are here. Spring once more. The animations we made that strange spring will always recall that time. And they’ll always be now: the birthdays, the flowers, the easter eggs, the first daffodil of the season.

To the here and now 💚✨🌼