Bottle Top Minge

What

A 2.5 metre long sign made out of 986 plastic bottle tops. (And well over that for the “Minger” adaptation.)
1101 bottle tops when in the longer “Minger” variant.

When

September 2018.

Why

For about 2 years before making this I’d been collecting plastic bottle caps and had over a thousand. Mostly from bottles littered on the field opposite my house, but also ones I’ve used and some from places like the streets of Rome. I had a general idea what to do with them, but didn’t know what exactly.

Basic litter art on the field opposite my house where I collected a lot of the lids from.

The more I thought about it, a massive “Minge” seemed just perfect. There are more, but I especially like the following aspects of it:

I’ve made a colourful, nice looking piece of art out of a crass vulgar word.
Usable trash recycled into something useless and trashy.
In original use, the caps preserved taste, my use of them is quite tasteless.
A serious lengthy effort for something silly and funny.
It’s all caps but sentence case at the same time.
It’s literally Pop Art.

Development & Progress

I made some frame plans and tests of different typefaces and decided on an appropriate size for my living room wall. The typeface is called “Black Script”. It was impossible to find for free. so I had to use screen captures to trace the word as I wasn’t paying £35 for a font.

I printed the letters in 3 coloured outlines to maximise the use of 27 sheets of paper

The taped prints pinned to a big piece of cardboard from Orderaround poster packaging.

I used a stitch picking tool to pierce dots along the printed outlines.

I joined the dots to make a smooth outline again.

The cut out letters. This took quite some time and effort.

Frame prepared for letters to be screwed on.

I separated out bags full of collected bottle tops into tubs of different colours.

Colours with low quantities (mostly yellow) were distributed across the piece first.

It took so long just to get the fancy “M” done.

Before I’d put the letters on the frame, I took them to my local disused railway line path and painted around them. This lasted a while. I was uneasy with it s I don’t usually put rude things in the public realm anymore.

Preparing an adaptation from “Minge” to “Minger”

The colours on the “r” were more varied. I might replace some of the over abundance of red and orange tops on the minge one day if I can be arsed.
This added a further 115 tops, so “Minger” has a total of 1101 bottle tops.

The downgraded artwork became “Minger” for a couple of weeks.

I only made the extra “r” in 2021 when I thought there was a chance of a photojournalist visiting my house and seeing the artwork and it also being photographed. I thought “Minge” wouldn’t be shown in a newspaper but “Minger” might. Although a photographer came, he was never in my house. It was for the Toy Suit and I appeared in the Daily Star. (Here.)

Appearing in Viz!

Shortly after I made it, I sent a photo of me with it to Viz. I was enormously pleased to show up on the letters page the next edition.
Oddly, it also meant that I could say that I’d been showing off my minge in a top shelf publication.

Getting into Viz was a very proud achievement.

Current Status

Still in place in my living room as of 2022. I don’t know if this would ever be embarrassing. I don’t have any strangers visit me.