About

“Skipism isn’t even a real word”

Back in 2003 we were re-learning how to put together a household from scratch, on the other side of the world. It turns out you don’t need very much, really. Which was handy, because that’s what we had. Most of it had belonged to other people already, but they’d loved it and left it at charity shops and car boots, or never loved it at all and flung it into skips. Those unwanted things, that we could turn into something we needed, excited us the most. We were happy over there with the wind off the Irish Sea blowing in our faces, living our life of skipism.

It took a long while for Skipism the site to pull itself together. In the early days it was just a page with a message: Flux – cuddle it.

Later, after we’d returned to the place where the colour green and life in general seemed far less vivid, Skipism, with its small array of re-purposed text and modest photoshopped collages proved itself incapable of cuddling flux and came to a halt. You can find that static version of Skipism here: Unpeople (the ones who send you spam) and Under the lid (a secret life of tins).

The version of Skipism that you’re looking at now attempts to draw together some of the things that take up my time these days. Other people’s discards are still a source of inspiration, and the flux cuddling, though as difficult as ever, remains the lesson we can always afford to keep relearning.

“Don’t you do anything else?”

Thanks for asking. There’s a little picture blog, that issues one little picture a day. It’s called The Knowledge and it won’t come as a surprise that the kind of knowledge it deals with isn’t all that useful in any real world circumstances. But we don’t think you should let that worry you.