“A really strong, powerful message” – Artist speaks about his role in new MediaCityUK exhibition

Original art from around the world has been unveiled in Media City as part of a free exhibition.

Ten Years to Save the World has brought together artists from the Philippines and the United Kingdom to create a series of comics that paint a picture of the severity of the climate crisis.

Since the start of the year the organisers, Creative Concern, have been working with artists to create the exhibition.

Jack Teagle, a 35-year-old comic illustrator who created one of the pieces, said: “I’ve been involved with Creative Concern for just over ten years now – I took part in a 24-hour comic challenge for them and have been in contact ever since.

“They approached me to be involved in this expedition seeing as I’d just finished illustrating a science book for kids, I thought I’d be able to give a good angle.”

Jack originally took a factual approach to his art, aiming to let people know just how big of a problem climate change is.

“The more I worked on it, the more information I wanted to include and it ended up looking like a bit of an essay.”

He decided to make his art more symbolic and emotional. His piece, called You Can’t Take it With You, focuses on the practice of “greenwashing.”. This is where companies put in effort to appear eco-friendly without taking any meaningful actions.

“That’s the great thing about these anthology exhibitions. There are other great artists that give you a lot of information in their pieces, and that allowed me to create something more abstract.

“I think shows like The Simpsons and artists like Banksy have shown that you can use quite silly or bizarre images to satirise things which in the real world are actually quite horrific.”

The exhibition has been popular with visitors to Media City, due to the unique styles of the artists and its aims to inform and convey. One of those visitors was Edward, 43.

He said: “It’s a really strong, powerful message and it’s great they’re showing it in comic form because it makes it quite easy to understand and it looks good.

“Even though it’s aimed at 18 – 24 years old – I feel like I can still understand it in my forties, and my parents would probably understand it too!”

Ten Years to Save the World will be in Media City until the 14^th of January and is free to all. All of the art pieces are also available to view online.

You can find more of Jack Teagle’s work here.