“I’m a product of my consumerist childhood,” the artist tells AnOther, as he transforms the Plaster Store in Soho into a grotesquely joyful immersive space
Gary Card’s world is loud. Grotesque, cluttered, and relentlessly theatrical with a DIY aesthetic, the artist and set designer has spent decades creating hypersaturated worlds where fashion detritus, childhood memories, and surreal stage design collide. His latest exhibition, Gathering Dust, takes over the entire Plaster Store in Soho across two floors, and true to Card’s aesthetic, there’s nothing tidy about it. “This whole show is a kind of a fuck you to good taste,” he says with a grin. “It’s completely bonkers.”
Few artists can work so confidently between fashion campaigns for Gucci, Balenciaga and Dior, to garish masking-taped busts and figurines from children’s TV nightmares. But for all the absurdity, there’s an underlying sincerity to Card’s work: a desire to repurpose found materials and childhood memory into an escapist theatrical world. “Discarded stuff is a massive influence," Card says. “I love finding things and asking: what can I make this into? What kind of character can it become?”
In Gathering Dust, downstairs is a sensory overload of objects, textures and characters set in a kaleidoscopic installation that brings together Card’s personal archive with new works, curiosities, experimental objects and detritus pulled from his studio, storage lock-up, and even his own kitchen. “Usually you’re looking outward for clients,” he says of his set design work for fashion campaigns. “But for this, it’s just looking back at everything I have, and seeing what kind of mad, kaleidoscopic space I can make of it.”
Upstairs, the tone shifts. Here, Card debuts a new series of head busts sculpted in just two weeks. Each head looks like it crawled out of a forgotten children’s show aired once in the 1990s, with melting features, bulging eyes, and teeth like chewed piano keys. Sculpted entirely from masking tape, the heads are draped in attitude but barely held together. “They start to reveal themselves as you build them,” Card explains each head has an individual character. “You start talking to them like ‘he needs wider eyes, those eyebrows are too pointy’, and suddenly, a character is born.”
Among the grotesquely joyful sculptures, malformed masks, and overwhelming mess of colour and form, there are paintings too. “There’s a series of portraits I’ve been working on for about a year and a half,” he says. “Then there are these things I call ‘trinkets’, weird figurative objects I’ve scoured the internet to find and then reinterpreted in my own way.”
Card’s material language is distinctly his own. “I’m a product of my consumerist childhood,” he says. “But my work isn’t necessarily a critique of consumption; it’s more of an observation, a reaction to what surrounds us.” It’s this obsession with excess, born from cartoons, comics, kids’ TV, and piles of street trash, which drives the show’s sensibility. “My personal work is figurative," he explains. “After a career building worlds around people, I wanted to just make the people.”
Gathering Dust isn’t just Gary’s personal archive of work, it’s also a gloriously chaotic DIY marketplace. Alongside his own sculptures, visitors can buy clothing, prints, zines and artefacts from a band of collaborators and creatives. London-based vintage collective Unified Goods are selling archived 80s and 90s pop culture ephemera, including bootleg VHS tapes, flyers, and nostalgic promo tees. Graphic artist and illustrator Ferry Gouw’s work plays with bold colour, surrealism, and post-pop brainwarp. Artist 4FSB (Jamie Bull), a longtime collaborator of Card and sculptor of iconic caps and headwear, reimagines his signature caps as sculptural headpieces mounted on busts, independent comics publisher Breakdown Press spotlights experimental illustrators, and artist Danny Taylor creates papier-mâché painted wall reliefs.
Whether it’s selling hats made from papier-mâché heads, plastic junk repurposed into sculpture, or comic books alongside one-off T-shirts, Gathering Dust is a riotous ride into Gary Card’s brain. “Don’t pander to an imaginary audience,” he says. “Just think about the kind of thing that drives you, makes you excited, and the right people will connect.” And connect they will. Because if you’ve ever hoarded toys you were meant to throw away, secretly worshipped garish colour clashes, or wanted to live inside a cartoon, then this show is for you.
Gathering Dust by Gary Card is on show at the Plaster Store in London until 9 August 2025.
