News Speak

News Speak is a screen printed work that presents us with a bewildering and almost hypnotic array of nonsense (invented) tabloid headlines. At the centre of the text is an image of a polony sausage, suggestive of a continual exudation of something homogenised and slumberous. The title News Speak is a play on George Orwell’s ‘Newspeak’, the fictional language of his imagined 1984 totalitarian state in which a limited language structure and reduced vocabulary ensures governed thinking. The comparison being made is between Orwell’s ideological ‘Newspeak’ and the corrosive meta-language of tabloid newspapers, which all too often has its origins rooted in an unhealthy relationship between politicians and journalists.