Mick Humpage was born in 1968 in Walsall, a town in England’s Black Country, and has lived in Jersey since 2007. He graduated with a BA (Hons) in Fine Art from Birmingham’s Margaret Street School of Art in 1995. He subsequently spent five years as guitarist with the band Subaqwa, during which time the group released several singles and an album, for which he also created the artwork. He has worked in education for the past 25 years and returned to his artistic practice with renewed focus during the COVID-19 lockdowns.

Mick paints, lo-fi prints and collages concrete dreamscapes. He retains an indie-punk approach, analogue and unpredictable processes being implicitly important and political. While he uses digital photography and punk mainstay-the photocopier as tools, Mick’s process is hands-on and playful. Childhood visits to brutiful Birmingham cemented an affinity with brutalist architecture and post-war urban spaces. Photography has always played a pivotal role in his work, both as a tool and as a visual language for image making and he is particularly inspired by the work of Saul Leiter. Mick says, “I like to get lost along the way, like walking through the city as it looms and leans over you, I paint, glue, rip and scrape my way in and out of corners. Accumulating decisions and accidents to create something warm, optimistic and human from urban spaces.”