All in a Day's Work: Oskar with a K

Oskar was in the year above me at Manchester School of Art and during lockdown I remember he organised a sticker callout where he sent you a batch of his stickers for free - an orange doodle style character. All you needed to do was send him a stamp and an addressed envelope to have a batch of the stickers sent back to you. I thought it was such a clever idea and Oskar encouraged people to stick them wherever they liked and they soon started appearing all round Manchester in 2020. It was a simple but really effective way to bring people together and it made you feel connected during isolation. It was also pretty fun to spot his playful little orange characters popping up in mundane settings, on random lamp posts, traffic lights, and street signs.

Since then, Oskar has gone on to create some slightly larger scale projects but they still retain that same public-facing, accessible feel. In lockdown, public art was all the more important for us to access something creative other than a screen. Living in Withington during lockdown there was a real explosion of graffiti and murals through an initiative run by Withington Walls who are a grassroots street art project connecting community and people to places.

The Marcus Rashford mural, just a short walk from my third-year uni house, was one of their most well-known pieces. Some of Oskar’s community projects and commissions have been created in collaboration with Withington Walls. He has since been involved in the Withington Walls exhibition and even had a mural from a local Manchester park featured on Noel Gallagher’s album artwork. The artwork Hope Beats Hate was designed by Oskar alongside my former graphic design lecturer, Katie Jones.

It was a pleasure to have Oskar involved in the All in a Day's Work interview series.

Name:
Oskar with a K

Role:
Collaborative muralist and public speaker

Summary of your work:  
I work with communities to create impactful, integrated, place-based murals. Most of my projects are collaborative, whether that’s working with other artists or creating participatory murals (or, ideally, both!). From time to time, I also tell stories about everything this work involves in front of an audience.

Starting the day

What do you enjoy seeing on your to-do list? Doing a site visit with a really enthusiastic client-to-be is always a delight. Drinking a delicious, pretentious black coffee somewhere. Visiting a gallery. Getting started on mock-ups for a new job, flicking through some juicy design mags for inspiration.

Do you encounter any simple moments of design joy on your commute? I don’t know about design joy, but I’ve been loving my little train commute at the moment. The other day, these amazing pink, fluffy clouds stretched across the whole horizon. People-watching is also just great on the train; I feel like you get a real window into humanity by watching people there, seeing their weird little quirks, and realising that we’re all just as odd as each other.

The working day

Why are you based in the North & is it important to what you do? I’m as southern as they come, growing up in Brighton, but I fell in love with Manchester when I visited back in 2017 for a uni open day. The huge brick factories, mammoth bridges, the canals. I’ve never seen a city own its urbanness quite as well as Manchester. I think it’s this urbanness that makes murals work so well; they really suit the city.

Do you think that the design/ creative sector in the North is thriving? I do, actually. I have a bunch of fab designy friends here (big up Chzbgs), and it always feels like things are bubbling away. You can’t go a week without a fantastic design event happening (that I have no way of getting to, seeing as I have two small kids at home). While it is thriving, it also feels like there’s a lot of scope for more. For example, I’d say Manchester has a relatively small street art and graffiti scene compared to other cities. I’d love it to look more like Berlin.

End of the day

What do you think is on the horizon for the design industry? I can really only talk about the public art world. I suppose I predict more extremes. More digital integration, as we see people walking around with AR glasses and digital overlays on public space. More frazzled, distracted energy, and all the weirdness that comes with that. But also more people opting out of the digital, and a further flourishing of lo-fi crafts. I’m on the luddite end, I think. I got rid of my smartphone a few months ago and have absolutely no regrets.

What does a satisfyingly complete day look like? Remaining out of my comfort zone, cracking a troublesome brief. Finishing a huge painting, with the sun in just the right place for a great photograph. Having laughed a lot, and having had a good chat about life at some point, too.

Day after day:

What symbolises the North for you? This is so lame, but the first thing that popped into my head was Andy Burnham’s £2 bus fare… He’ll love that.

What are you watching on telly? Waiting for the Out on iPlayer. God, what an incredible masterpiece that is.

A piece of everyday design that you adore? Our kitchen tap has been dripping for the past year. I’ve just installed a new one. I’m looking at it every few minutes as I write this and, satisfyingly, it is not dripping. That’s as everyday as it gets!

I love the optimism and energy from Oskar around the future of design, I feel it is a good reflection of his uplifting practice. His admiration of Manchester's urban vast landscape feels intertwined in his practice as he really utilises the urban brickwork as a blank canvas and his work reminds me of how exciting it is to have design in apublic setting to brighten a mundane street. His fondness of the city and the collective energy of the design community has made me miss Manchester and its charm. Recently, in North Shields in the North East, there have been new mural commissions popping up, which has been exciting to see. But back in lockdown, Withington Walls felt ahead of the game, transforming our repetitive daily walks into something colourful and hopeful.

When thinking about the future of design, I find it important to consider it both in the digital and the analogue, much like Oskar does. Al design is rapidly increasing in how we engage with visual culture, especially with the growing use of AI to generate assets or even entire designs. More people are producing work at speed, sometimes with a throwaway mentality. At the same time, analogue, low-fi and traditional tools feel increasingly important for both designers and clients as a way to break free from the saturated world of clean, sleek and overly perfected Instagram grids or billboards. It also adds a sense of ownership to work that can't be created in the digital or replicated by AI. One of my favourite studios that are bringing this handmade feel to quite sleek commercial brands is Ana Projects who animate in a tactile and handmade style for luxury well established clients like Hermès, Nike and Marc Jacobs.

For me, the grit, imperfection and humanity within design are the most compelling parts of storytelling. I think this is why Oskar’s work consistently resonates with me, especially projects like the Stalyhill Junior School mural, which celebrates real voices, ideas and community expression.

I might have seen hundreds of creative projects during lockdown, but Oskar’s sticker project always stayed with me, it invited participation and made me feel directly involved in the design itself.

Thank you Oskar for an insight in your day's work!

If you would like to say hello to Oskar give him an email here: hello@oskarwithak.com. Or check out his Instagram here.

Thank you for reading, I hope you enjoyed, LMK your thoughts and stay tuned for the next editions of All in a Day's Work by Millie Jobson.