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Tom Alexander

writer / artist / publisher
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The Run

March 14, 2024

30 paper coffee cups, 60 x 600mm approx + A4 card base

Overview

A story about good fortune and self-belief, told through coffee cups.

Background

This is the story of my amazing run of free coffees from a particular chain of sandwich shops. It’s another step in the process of trying to find a way for form and content to not just coexist, but support each other in a mutually dependent way. It’s sometimes said that every object tells a story and I take that very literally by slapping a load of text over anything I might find in my immediate vicinity.

I had the idea for The Run while on a short break in Folkestone, which is a very nice seaside town in Kent with a lot of public art. I don’t know if it was this factor that inspired me to write a story on a stack of paper cups, but I don’t think it was coincidence. (There is also a very nice coffee shop there called Steep Street Coffee, which I can highly recommend.)

The amount of free coffees I used to get from Pret was a source of some annoyance to my partner, so creating a towering shrine to my good fortune seemed somehow appropriate. The reader takes a cup from the top of the left hand stack, reads the text printed inside the cup and then stacks it on the right hand side. (Instructions are printed on the base.)

Two sleeves of paper coffee cups were purchased from a local pound shop and I printed the sections of story on cardboard discs, which I then cut out using the Cameo Silhouette cutting machine. Those were then stuck down to the bottom of the cup using crafter’s tape. It’s not a perfect process. If I were to make it again, I think I would use edible ink and print them on the cup surface itself. The card stock doesn’t quite match the cups, which is why the pictures are presented in black and white. I did have plans for a fancy online version of The Run with animation and all kinds of bells and whistles, but I think a simple slideshow works just as well.

If anyone has any ideas of where I might be able to display The Run, I’d be interested to hear them. Coffee shops seem an obvious venue, but perhaps that would just lead to confusion.

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