It’s About Fucking Time
Spray paint and stencil on billboard advertisement
Executed 17th September 2024, Notting Hill Gate, London
In the early hours of 17th September 2024, I turned a billboard at Notting Hill Gate into a space for reflection. The location, alive with London’s constant movement, felt like the perfect stage for what would become one of my most resonant public interventions. The billboard was part of Stella McCartney’s campaign proclaiming, in bold type, “It’s About Fucking Time” The slogan itself already carried a sense of urgency, radical, unfiltered, and courageous, and rather than opposing it, I wanted to extend it. My intention was not to overwrite her message, but to deepen it; to bring it into the psychological and social realm I inhabit as an artist, where the themes of childhood, technology and awareness intertwine.
Beneath that stark red and white campaign image, I introduced one of my own figures: a small child rendered in my signature monochrome stencil style, standing below a drifting red balloon. The child holds a smartphone, capturing the balloon through the lens instead of reaching for it. It’s a simple gesture, but one that speaks to something profoundly modern; the act of experiencing life through a screen rather than through touch, the impulse to document over to feel. The balloon, as in so many of my works, represents imagination and play: innocence made weightless. As it floats away, the child’s instinct to record rather than to reach reveals a subtle tragedy, the quiet acceptance of loss as long as it’s captured.
For me, the dialogue between Stella’s campaign and my intervention was natural. Her work spoke to urgency and change, to challenging systems of complacency. I responded to that same spirit, but from another angle: the internal one. Where her campaign confronted the fashion world’s environmental and ethical responsibilities, I wanted to bring the conversation to the inner landscape, to how we, especially the youngest among us, have been reshaped by the constant presence of screens. I saw her statement as a call to awareness; I simply added another dimension to it.
After the piece was finished, I wrote: “Change begins with awareness. It only takes a few committed minds to reshape the world. Grateful to those who lead with purpose and challenge the norm. With respect and support to Stella McCartney, let’s create a better future.” That post summed up what I felt. This was never an act of rebellion against the campaign, but of alignment with its essence, a collaboration across disciplines, values, and mediums, united by the belief that art should question, provoke, and inspire.
Formally, the composition relied on restraint. The black silhouette of the child and the crimson balloon blended seamlessly into the existing billboard, as though the two had been conceived together. Yet the addition altered everything. The slogan,“It’s About Fucking Time”, no longer read only as defiance. In this new context, it became a warning, a quiet lament: it’s about time to act, before something irreversible is lost.
What made this piece powerful to me was its unannounced nature. It appeared without spectacle, without permission, and yet within hours it was seen, photographed, and shared by people passing by. That act of collective noticing was the work itself. For a few days, a transcendent advertisement and a public artwork coexisted, merging commerce, conscience and culture into a single urban mirror.
Looking back, It’s About Fucking Time reaffirmed my faith in art’s civic power. I don’t seek to provoke outrage; I seek to awaken reflection. This intervention fused my mission, to raise awareness about the psychological and emotional costs of technological dependency, with the vitality of the street. It was proof that art could infiltrate the everyday without aggression, carrying intelligence and empathy into public space.
The image of the child and the balloon continues to stay with me. It reminds me that the urgency is not abstract. Childhood is floating away in front of us (and in front of them) quietly, gracefully and perhaps irrevocably. And it truly is about time, to look up, to reach out and to decide whether we will let it drift beyond our grasp.