After a visit to a couple of art galleries in Leeds, I had the idea to create a leaflet for a fake gallery of my own “art” and leave it in prominent locations as a bit of an artistic prank. I wasn’t aiming for an entire retrospective, just a small selection of three types of my work: the bottle top pieces, the public space sign projects, and the Rude Pantry packaging.

The gallery itself, of course, couldn’t be real. I decided to call it “The Võlts Gallery,” with “Võlts” (pronounced “vults”) being the Estonian word for “fake.” I chose Estonian purely because I’d recently visited the country. To make it more convincing, I thought it needed a website, so I bought the domain www.thevolts.org and threw together some very basic placeholder content. Web design isn’t something I find quick or easy, but the site gives the leaflet a bit of credibility—at least until someone digs deeper.

The leaflet is a tongue-in-cheek take on the “fake it until you make it” mentality. I don’t think my work would ever be shown in a real gallery, but I’ve definitely seen far worse on display. The project was as much about the fun of designing the leaflet and creating a convincing tone as it was about placing it in the wild and seeing what happens.

In September 2024 I distributed the leaflets across Leeds: the Coach Station, A Nation of Shopkeepers pub, the Central Library, the Art Gallery, and Leeds Museum. I had no idea how long they’d stay there, whether they’d be quickly removed, ignored, or picked up by someone genuinely intrigued. If anyone tries to visit the Võlts Gallery, they’ll end up in a backstreet behind the central Leeds Telephone Exchange where I trained for a job back in 1999.

For added realism, I included a working gallery email address, this website, and even my phone number (intercepted by my answer phone, naturally). To give the project a suitably pretentious tone, I used ChatGPT to help craft a polished, artsy description of myself and my work. The result is exactly what I wanted.

No one ever got in touch by any method and in over 3 months it only got 100 views. Anmd many of those were probably me or Facebook friends.