Base Camp

[gentle upbeat music]

London is super tough to be able to,

especially as an artist or a working class creator,

to find space to be affordable to live,

but also affordable to create in.

Finding a space,

it's helped me engage with my art in a deeper sense,

in a bit more of a freer sense.

[upbeat music]

Max Allen, take one.

[clapboard thudding]

My name is Max Allen.

I'm an artist specializing

in costume and theatrical design.

I live in a warehouse in North London.

It's my home, and it's my studio space.

I live with about nine people,

and I've been here for nine years as well.

Moved in as a place to sleep,

and my work has spread through to the studio.

This has kind of opened up

like a really interesting work pattern for me.

[upbeat music]

So myself and Elliot Adcock, my business partner,

we have a costume business called Allen and Adcock.

So we design, create,

and source costumes for film, stage, TV.

We love looking at historical garments,

and then flipping them

with a modern queer club kid element basically.

That's our real passion, I think.

We always like to call it luxury in poverty, right?

Taking something that is cheap,

and spending a little time

to make that interesting, exciting.

Challenging tackiness and taste,

elements of iconography.

This is sort of a personal interest,

as well as my work interest,

and I guess it's reflected in my living space.

It sort of trails off me wherever I go.

That energy, it carries on all the way through

to where I go to bed.

It's really good for me to have this bedroom

with a bit of a living space in it

to kind of create a bit of a sanctuary.

I think it's sort of a myth that we have

to have these stripped, beige spaces in which to relax.

There's nowhere in nature,

you know, you go into like a woodland forest,

there's colors and textures and taste everywhere.

You still can be relaxed in color and texture.

[upbeat music]

I grew up in a place called Matlock Bath in Darbyshire,

which started as a Victorian tourist place,

but now it's fish and chip shops, motorcyclists,

theme parks, amusement arcades.

I grew up in a Victorian terrace house,

but the people before we lived there,

I think in the sixties,

had decorated it with like old Sanderson wallpaper.

So I had this really heavy, detailed wallpaper

all around me,

matching curtains and stuff,

and my mum could obviously, you know,

not afford to wallpaper the house and stuff,

so we kept it really nice.

And looking back, I realized, of course,

that sort of influenced the detail

that I like to live around.

If I had some more room,

it would be like a live-in walk-in collage

of all my interesting ideas.

But things I've picked up, it's really,

so much is about finding stuff in pound shops

or charity shops, right?

Like, the tinsel on the roof is like little bits

that I find from the charity shop,

and I bought one piece and put it up,

and then realized, oh, actually,

I should put more and more up,

and every sort of year, I put another couple of pieces up.

But it sort of distracts

from the like badly clad ceiling, right?

And also, it reflects.

It moves nicely when there's air into it.

It tingles and shimmers.

I've got images on my wall

that my friends have drawn for me, I think.

Mostly they're just like pieces

that people have given me for my birthday,

and then I've taken the time to frame them in sheet frames

and paint the frames.

So often, I'll put that on the wall,

and something will remind me of it next to it,

and I'll build around it.

I love Donald Duck.

I think he's really a fantastic character,

but also, visually, I really like it.

I don't know. I just find those things interesting.

Those masks, I guess there's a little bit of element

of the retro kitsch to it,

but yeah, it's just objects that I found for cheap on eBay

that are interesting.

[upbeat music]

Clothes I've made,

I understand them more as textile art pieces, right?

So I like to show them.

A, I store them visually

because I don't really have anywhere else to store them,

but also, you know, they are beautiful pieces of art.

I've spent time to embroider them, hand dye them,

so they should be treated as such.

Paint little bits every now and again.

You know, I'll paint the outside of my desk in stripes

or I'll paint my radiator.

You know, I never have chance

to like take everything off the wall and paint a large part,

but it's just about, every now and again,

painting a little bit decoration.

I like the way that everything to an eye distracts

from what it is.

I'm really attached to my witches balls.

They really reflect my interest

of like British folk history,

but also like bright, shiny, sparkly,

seemibly quite tacky objects.

They perfectly encapsulate the two parts

of my work and interests.

[upbeat music]

My hope for the future here is to maintain

and build on what we have created so far

as I make more set design and object pieces,

and I want to make more textiles

for people's homes.

I'm working on custom curtains to, you know,

spice up a maybe too-beige Hackney homeowner's house.

[Max laughing]

[upbeat music]