january (Patreon)

hey there, hope everyones keeping well, its so cold here in the US and most of u are boiling hot in australia by the sounds of things so i guess we're all united by deranged weather!!!!

was a fun challenge to try and draw a largely wordless cartoon that describes *what the union is* to workers new to the concept at an UWU chicken abattoir, where ppl mostly speak languages other than english. apparently the boss has been harassing the majority female workforce so the cartoon pushes back against that treatment, as the way to try and communicate the idea of solidarity. I think we’re going to put translations of the text in the border all around the thing. 

That was literally my only paid gig in the last couple of months, December n January are always pretty quiet, so thanks for keeping me going. i didnt get paid anything for literally any of the work in the rest of this update, oopsie

im headed down to Matewan in rural West Virginia next week to paint a small mural in the Mine Wars Museum there. The Mine Wars are how ppl describe the biggest labour uprising in US history (like literal armed struggle peppered thru the Appalchian mountains, massacres, aggressively and proactively erased history, a dramatically altered industry in the aftermath blablabla), which happened a century ago last year. I’m painting the above Mother Jones inspired piece on the wall in the research space there. The museum exists against all odds, and has next to no budget, so you guys are paying me to do it, and to get there, so thanku 4 that

Starting tomorrow I’m painting this design on the wall of Red Ink, a socialist community space here in Providence:

It's based on the slogan they used when founding the space, a karl marx quote "to be radical is to grasp things by the root", but i cut the first half of the sentence for the mural design cos i feel like it's low key corny to self identify as radical in certain contexts. the community centre also has fuck all money so i’m painting the mural w donated labour

Really excited to cut my teeth a bit more with these murals, build my confidence a little, n then get back to australia and do sum on some more outward facing, public walls. Pls let me know if you know of any walls that might be hungry

Rough sketch for a drawing that I mentioned in previous update, about the Red Cross's ban on blood donations from men who sleep with men, hoping to finish it off soon

Finally getting my booster tomorrow morning, so i finished off this photo frame for Facebook so that other poofters or whoever else can use it!! if anyone uses facebook anymore!!! i just tried to add it to facebook but apparently they only let a couple of big vetted organisations make those profile picture frames these days  :-C but if u are one of the like 3 people that the drawing might appeal to and if u wanna use the graphic and manually make a profile pic feel free u can download it from here https://www.samwallman.com/downloadable-art 

i drew the below 'KEEP GOING' piece as a phone background, if anyone wants it, was a chance for me to experiment with a kind of different drawing style. You can download a high resolution version of it from the same part of my website linked above.

I have no idea if ppl are into this sort of thing, phone wallpapers - if anyone is, pls lemme know and i can make more of them they're pretty easy. i guess i wld make more optimistic, struggley type designs, as positive reminders when u look at yr phone, but if u have any other ideas of what you’d like to see as a phone wallpaper pls lemme know. also if u do try using it as ur wallpaper and it doesnt quite fit or work out pls let me know.

At that same url u can also download this ‘union bug’ for your own purposes, esp if u work for an organisation that does lots of printing:

i will cut and paste what i wrote about it on social media because im lazy:
“a bug is a stamp or label that indicates that an object was produced by union labour. This kind of icon has historically been discretely added to designs that are produced by workers who are union members, as a way to show support for collectivism and to attempt to make our labour less abstracted. This particular design also includes a head-nod to the fact that we live, work and organise on Aboriginal land."

I plan to keep adding stuff to that ‘downloadable art’ page from time to time, that people can save for free and print themselves. there are a handful of high res graphics up there now, I might make a Patreon only page with some more stuff on it sometime.
When i was isolating with coorvid i also made a new page on my website with all those ‘held in common labour slogans’ collected on it, there are over 50 of them now, gonna keep plugging away with that series until i’ve made 100. 

as always pls lemme know if u want high res versions of any of them for organising purposes, thats what they’re made for, or if u want any translated or anything. i recently tinkered with one so that it wld look more specific to a friends particular industry at his request, so it might resonate more with his fellow members, always happy to do that sort of thing

There happens to be an electrical union headquarters like ten minutes walk from my boyfriends mums place where we’re staying here in Providence in Rhode Island. she told me about it cos she always notices the amazing lights they have out front of the building, next to the massive fuck-off solar panels. Their christmas light display this year could be described as borderline manic lol, “if the electrical union can’t put on a light show then we may as well pack up and go home”. anyway this week i hit them up to see if they might let me work out of their space while i’m here, and they gave me their fucken boardroom to use whenever :.-O :.-O
extremely grateful to have a quiet and warm space to work from while im here, and kinda floored by their generosity. real “everyone on the planet lives in one country called capitalism” vibes. also “invisible criss-crossing network of international solidarity” energy

The way the left provides entry points and portals all over an otherwise hostile world reminds me of this quote from Jeff Sparrows book Communism: A Love Story, even tho he was writing about the middle of last century: “their beliefs rendered foreigners oddly familiar to each other, since each could have parachuted into the homeland of the other and oriented themselves more or less accurately in a strange political landscape, identifying allies and detecting enemies, and charting the general line of march. Wherever their origin, whatever their occupation, the movement gave them a common identity, subordinating differences and binding strangers together, not just with each other, not simply with the oppressed of far-off lands, but with the achievements of those who had struggled before”

the US is about to open its first safe injecting space ever(!). as a small gesture of support I took a big print of the ’Safe injecting rooms save lives’ poster i made last year to this space, which has been set up in a main street of Providence, to serve as a kind of interactive exhibition and an example of how the future site will function. 

Their setup is an effort to normalise the idea of this kind of space, demonstrate how it will look and function and so on, and apparently it has been met with very little resistance, which rules, hopefully the nimbys stay unorganised. 

It was funny to talk to the workers about how they came about designing the space (partly thru studying australian safe injecting rooms, naw, seems we don’t *only* export racist border policies who’d hav thought), and they said that they intentionally made it as boring and kinda sterile as they could to reinforce that it’s a benign, everyday presence in the community. But then they had to balance that with making it feel homely and cosy for the users who will frequent the space, who they want to feel invited and safe.

May a thousand safe injecting rooms bloom!!!!!!!!!!!!

poster by 'Harm Reduxx PVD'

Don’t think i shared this scrappy banner here that Nicky Minus and I painted a couple of months ago, based on fellow Workers Art Collective member Nic Robertsons design. with fabric loops stitched by my mum <3

Ansell are a hideous corportation, deploying debt bondage in countries where they are less accountable, beating the shit out of unionists on occasion, firing active members etc. we met up outside their corporate headquarters in Richmond, felt like a small thing and it was, but it was a day of lots of small actions across the world, and probably it meant something to ppl thru out the supply chain in other countries to know that fellow workers are taking their fight to the HQ. was interesting to think about the interconnectedness of all the industries linked to the company, especially as Jerome Small spoke on the day - Ansell products are obviously used in hospitals here, but they’re also used in warehousing, abattoirs, anywhere with PPL really (which is just about every single workplace these days). Thinking about how we might try to make their supply chains visible felt borderline psychedelic, cos the chains of labour that produce and distribute their products zig-zag all over the planet it’s wild. It’s not just warehousing workers picking and packing, but also the harvesting of rubber plants, the processing of raw materials, the freights, retailers, the end consumers and all the rest. so many places you can imagine a global union movement with teeth intervening - it shldn’t matter if people in only one location at any time are being fucked over by the company, ideally any other site along the supply chain should be able to respond to make them feel the heat. i think we’re a long way off that happening but on the day, it felt like there was a fumbling path to that sort of thing maybe. if u want to get involved in the campaign u can contact Australia Asia Worker Links, its been going for years and im sure they'd appreciate anyone who wants to get involved.

on the topic of international solidarity stuff, it has been extremely cool to witness a rare instance of us artists not being total egomaniacs lol, heeding the call from Palestinians to join the BDS campaign by boycotting the recent Sydney Festival, the cats got herded. There is a good write-up of the campaign here including this line “the effusive response to the boycott call has been unprecedented, in fact historic. It is being cited as the most effective, creative and impactful campaign targeting complicit Israeli sponsorship of an international arts event in Australia, and indeed one of the most successful in the world."

anonymous mural in Gaza a couple of days ago, riffing off the Sydney Festival logo

okay i’ll leave it there i think, i hope i wasn't too rambley with this update... thanks to the few new supporters who have signed up recently, I will mail you some stuff when i get back to australia i wont forget!!!! and i will write more next month <3

sam

ps lets prove this wrong