SKETCHBOOK @ellie-pennick - Tumblr Blog

Relation to practice

The works of Spanish-born artist Eugenio Merino deal with matters such as politics, religion, and society with the purpose of making us question our assumptions – the truth we are told by society, by the images and constructs of the dominant culture.

“My work is about our relation with the world we live in and its connection with humor,” says Merino. “Issues such as rising inequality (Joseph Stiglitz), the McDonaldization of our society (George Ritzer), the effects of Capitalism and the power of brands (Naomi Klein), our beliefs, our history, and our present.”

Although Merino’s based in Madrid I caught up with him in Houston – where his work is featured in two concurrent shows – Corpocracy at the Station Museum of Contemporary Art, and a solo show – Will Work for Fast Food at the UNIX Gallery.

Let’s take a quick tour of Merino’s art, beginning with a series of sculptures of world leaders “frozen” inside refrigerators decorated with a familiar corporate “logo.”

“The sculptures are about how certain politicians cast a long shadow over the countries they rule – propped up by corporations. Now, sometimes I feel like corporations are the new dictators,” says Merino with a gentle smile. He is serious as he talks about how societies are trapped in the frozen ideologies of their dominant leaders – some dead, some alive. “In Spain, we still feel the ghost of Franco.”

The faces of the “frozen leaders” are both ghoulish and funny at the same time:

Across town, at his solo show, we meet the artist standing below another familiar symbol made of laser-cut aluminum and enamel:

“DISNEY is a trap,” explains Merino. “You’re free to do whatever you like, as long as it’s sold to you by DISNEY. We live our lives in cages, designed and manipulated by the corporations under the illusion of freedom.”

A young art fan pauses to stare at another of Merino’s works and says: “It’s got horns, like the Devil.”

“The Anonymous 1% control our politics and the future of this planet. This mask is the other end of the spectrum – the opposite of the people in the Occupy movement. We don’t know who all these elite are. They control much of the world’s wealth in stealth,” says Merino.

Across from the mask of inequality is a solid cube – a block – suspended above what looks to be a disheveled, gray-haired, homeless man sleeping (or is he dead)? The man’s fingers point upwards – a hopeless prayer, perhaps?

Behind the homeless man, under glass, sits a pair of luxury glasses which look rather stylish until you notice the mushroom clouds on the lenses:

Once again, Merino is concerned about inequality and its effects. The rich are destroying the world, through willful ignorance or, more likely, through the active exploitation of its resources.

Who killed the Earth? Looking back, as I write this, I think of Bill McKibben’s arrest at a gas station in Vermont. All we do is watch.

Merino’s show is called Will Work For Fast Food, and the sign says so loud and clear:

The sign is made of bronze and is typical of the signs you see on the streets of Houston. Merino tells me he is stunned by the number of homeless people he has seen in Houston. I ask him why he chose bronze for the placard. His answer is once again thoughtful and provocative: “I wanted to show how heavy the burden of poverty is – and how it is also noble. The poor have few options for good food, and everywhere we see growing unemployment.”

I asked Merino if he is depressed by his work.

He smiles yet again and says that the only choice we have is to laugh.

Born in 1975 in Spain, Eugenio Merino graduated from the Complutense University of Madrid. He has had numerous solo and group exhibitions and has participated in a variety of art fairs, including Volta NY, Volta Basel, ARCO (Madrid), Art Brussels, FIAC (Paris), Armory Show, Arte Fiera (Bologna), Art BO (Bogota), MACO (Mexico), Art Wynwood (Miami) and has exhibited in the MOCA Museum of Taipei and the B.P.S.22 in Charleroi (Belgium).

Merino lives and works in Madrid, Spain.

Eugenio Merino’s

Nine years ago Lithuania broke away from the Soviet Union, leaving a lot of empty plinths that had previously been occupied by statues of Lenin, Marx and their regional disciples. An obvious question remained: what to do with the empty plinths?

Saulius Paukstys, a civil servant and member of the Vilnius bohemian set, saw the opportunity to fulfill a lifelong ambition. He founded the Frank Zappa Fan Club and commissioned a socialist realist sculptor to create a statue of Zappa on a patch of land in front of a children's hospital in the center of the city.

"We were desperate to find a symbol that would mark the end of communism, but at the same time express that it wasn't always doom and gloom," Paukstys recalls. He now holds the post of national security chief.

At first, the authorities criticized the plan, particularly after discovering that Zappa was a bit of a leftie. "They said: 'What has he got to do with Lithuania anyway?' We said: 'Nothing really.' Then someone convinced them that Zappa had Jewish features and seeing as Jewish history is very important to Lithuania, they plumped for that."

The statue was erected in downtown Vilnius five years ago. The most famous of modern Bohemians, Czech president Vaclav Havel, was invited to the unveiling, where a military brass band played Zappa hits. Membership of the fan club ballooned; a radio station allocated airtime for a weekly Zappa broadcast, which included doses of Zappa philosophy; and a Zappa Love Letter Club was set up to bring Vilnius's lonely hearts together.

The fan club and the city's artistic community are practically synonymous, so when the artists started drifting back to their old haunt of Uzupis, Zappa was the natural candidate for a patron saint. And last spring, when the local artists and young people decided to take a stand against the city council's neglect of Uzupis, he was the figure they rallied behind. "The spirit of Zappa made us see that independence from Moscow was not enough and persuaded us to declare independence from the rest of Vilnius," says Paukstys.

"We're trying to relearn the smell of identity," agrees Roman Lileikis, president of Uzupis and one of Lithuania's leading musicians and film-makers. The smell may be rather pungent. The name Uzupis means "the other side of the river" and the waterway has long served as a natural border - the area remained cut off from the old town until two bridges were erected in the 16th century. For hundreds of years it was the home of Russian and Jewish residents but during the war almost all of its population disappeared, leaving empty homes which were occupied by prostitutes and bandits.

One of Europe’s most hotly anticipated art museums to date is now complete and open for public viewing – but visitors will need to bring a snorkel.

Positioned in several groupings, many of the statues were cast from real people. According to the artist, each installation aims to draw attention to global issues such as climate change, conservation, and migration.

Will Ryman is known for creating monumental public sculptures that transform and enliven the daily urban experience. In these works, Ryman represents natural subjects at many times their normal size and installs them in active city streets, as with Bee (2011). Viewed in this context, the colorful and eye-catching figures are fantastical, evoking a sense of childlike awe over things normally taken for granted. Ryman also creates indoor installations, manipulating the sizes of various objects to suggest their relative importance to the artist or viewer; a beer can, for instance, may be as large as a lamp. He is the son of minimalist painter Robert Ryman, and his style recalls the Pop Art of Jasper Johns and Claes Oldenburg, the latter also known for creating large-scale, good-humored public works.

It is Damien Hirst with a bloody hole in his head – the richest bad boy of British art finally turned into a piece of half-pickled art himself.

Spanish artist Eugenio Merino's sculpture, which shows a Hirst figure pointing a gun at himself and blowing his own brains out, is meant to be a comment on the British artist's own £50m diamond-studded skull, For the Love of God.

Merino has called his piece "4 the Love of Go(l)d", suggesting that Hirst's attempts to increase the value of his own work would only be enhanced by his own death.

"I thought that, given that he thinks so much about money, his next work could be that he shot himself. Like that the value of his work would increase dramatically," Merino told The Guardian. "Obviously, though, he would not be around to enjoy it."

Merino's work, displayed in the sort of glass case that Hirst likes to fill with formaldehyde and dead animals, has been on display at Madrid's ARCO art fair.

"It is a joke but it is also paradoxical that if he did kill himself his work would be worth even more," said Merino. "That is a metaphor for the current state of the art world."

Merino said that many people thought the work meant that he hated Damien Hirst when in fact, he was a great admirer. "I am a fan. I studied him at art school. I'm just adding my own little grain of sand," said Merino, who devoted the rest of his ARCO show to parodies of Hirst's work.

These included a football split in half to expose the inside of a skull and brain called "Hooligan's Anatomy" after Hirst's own anatomical works.

Hirst may have set records with his diamond-studded skull and the recent, credit crunch-defying £111m auction of his work, but Merino is not himself averse to money.

In fact, the Hirst money-making magic seems to have rubbed off on him. His 4 the Love of Go(l)d has been snapped up by a buyer from Florida, reportedly for $41,000 (£28,800). All his other Hirst spoofs have also been bought at ARCO, going to collectors in Holland and Portugal.

"The art market is bad but actually this year has been spectacular for me," the 33-year-old artist said. "It is ironic. I've never sold so much."

Broken officer sculpture by Zhao Zhao at Chambers Fine Art, 2011

There's an interesting article in the current Spiegel which looks at the increasing attention paid to artist Zhao Zhao by the Chinese Government. Zhao, 30, is one of China's most promising young artists. His paintings, sculptures, and videos address realities in his country, as well as documenting his life and those of his friends - one of whom is Ai Weiwei with whom he worked for seven years.

Zhao was supposed to have a major solo exhibition in New York this year, at a gallery owned by Christophe Mao, an art dealer active in both Beijing and New York. For Zhao, the exhibition would have been an important step toward making a name for himself internationally. He packed up a large number of his works to be shipped by sea - but, according to the article, the shipment never left the port of Tianjin. Customs police confiscated it.

One of the items seized was a sculpture of Zhao's consisting of the shattered pieces of a concrete statue, a figure of an enormous police officer. The number on the officer's uniform is the date on which Ai Weiwei was arrested in 2011. Zhao made the sculpture during Ai's imprisonment.

Zhao showed the work publicly for the first time in October 2011 in a Beijing gallery. Nobody batted an eyelid. However, a few days before a subsequent group show at the gallery turned up and ordered the removal of the sculpture from the show reportedly claiming,"It wasn't art".

`MANIMALS` project in the framework of Participate Baku Public Art Festival 2013. Within Mark Jenkins workshop students was create a series of projects for t...

Visit Original Link

Audio for the recent exhibition.

France's 'invisible disaster': how heroin devastated the banlieues in the 1980s

Nasser was the first to go, back in 1984. His eyes were often bloodshot and he seemed to sweat a lot, his friends noticed. He had fallen for heroin. That was shortly after the 1983 March for Equality and Against Racism (also called the Marche des Beurs), the 30th anniversary of which has just been celebrated. Nasser went into Paris to join the march with his mates from the Bosquets estate at Clichy-sous-Bois, north-east of the capital. Nordine was the next to become a user, two years later. Both have died since, one in hospital in 1989, the other in 1993, of an overdose. Years later Mohamed Mechmache, the head of the community organisation ACleFeu, is still furious. At one point he stumbled on his cousin with a needle still hanging from his arm. Much as many other members of his generation, he is convinced "the authorities did nothing" to stem the plague of heroin, then HIV-Aids, which devastated France's estates.

Thousands lost their lives unnoticed, just like Nasser and Nordine. But the health authorities have published neither statistics nor reports on this tragedy. Indeed until now few university researchers have focused on the explosive mixture of drugs, Aids, sink estates and immigration. But things are at last changing. France's National Research Agency (ANR) has just awarded funding to Anne Coppel and Michel Kokoreff, two sociologists specialising in drug addiction. Their mission is to write a history of heroin, in order to obtain a clear picture of what they describe as an "invisible disaster", which they started investigating several years ago.

In the early years of President François Mitterrand's first term of office, drugs were plentiful and freely available not only in middle-class circles, but also for kids on out-of-town estates. Despite rampant unemployment and poverty, there was still a glimmer of hope as France's banlieue youth suddenly entered the political fray with the Marche des Beurs, asserting their right to a place in society. And just like everyone else, they wanted some fun too.

On Saturday nights they would dress up and visit their mates, riding in a Citroën DS saloon if one of them was lucky enough to have a factory job, or in a more humdrum Peugeot 504 borrowed from someone's father. Then they would drive to the Kiss Club or the Poney in Paris, or the Métropolis in Rungis (among the few clubs that would admit second-generation immigrants). There they could taste anything they fancied. Nasser and Nordine would go "wild" on these outings, Mechmache says. "With their mates they would smarten up, then at about 10pm a string of cars would tour the Bosquet estate at Clichy-sous-Bois, hooting their horns," he says.

Imported from Amsterdam and distributed in Paris, heroin gradually spread through the banlieue estates. It soon proved deadly in high-rise blocks where poorly educated or unemployed youths wasted away their time. A drug "to forget", heroin put an end to physical misery and sent users floating off on a cloud, well away from reality. In just three days they would be hooked. "To begin with they would disappear to shoot up. But after a bit we'd see them all over the place, in the stairwells and halls, the bike shed, up on the roof with the washing lines. We used to collect the syringes on the football pitch before starting to play," Mechmache recalls.

There were endless illustrations of their wretched existence: strung-out teenagers selling their parents' TV to buy that day's "stuff"; mothers sending kids back to their home village in north Africa to get off the drug; physical decline that parents could not understand; prison sentences for many, bringing deeper addiction; accidents leading to blood tests and the discovery of encroaching illness. Such scenes were repeated all over the sink estates around Paris, Lyon and Marseille. "In 93 [the Seine-Saint-Denis department] intravenous [injection] was very widespread and contamination spread like it was networking," says Nelly Boulanger, former head of the Arcade organisation.

"Everyone passed round syringes just like a joint … We thought [Aids] was a gay disease. No one told us how serious it was and the risks people were taking," says Ahmed Kerrar, a sports instructor at the Paris suburb of La Courneuve, who lost about 15 friends.

"Mums would never go out without their jewels, never let go of their handbag for fear their boys might nick them to buy heroin," says Yamina Benchenni, who used to run a group for mothers trying to cope with drugs on the Flamants estate in Marseille.

But the families were too ashamed and kept quiet. The first to wake up to the scale of the disaster were a few general practitioners. Didier Ménard, a family doctor at Les Francs-Moisins, Saint Denis, was horrified. "The first HIV-positive drug addicts started appearing in 1985-86. As very few of us would treat them, they came in from all over the eastern suburbs. We did what we could, making it up as we went along, trying unauthorised replacement substances," Ménard says.

Drug addicts in Paris in 1996 Heroin proved deadly in the high-rise blocks of French cities where poorly educated or unemployed youths wasted away their time. Photograph: Sipa Press/Rex Features At the time hospital departments were adamant that the only solution was enforced withdrawal and psychiatric supervision. It was forbidden to distribute syringes and opioid or morphine substitutes. The French Order of Physicians (the medical association) would strike off doctors who broke the rules. Some medical centres formed networks, on the sidelines of the health service that was deaf to their warnings.

"The public health service and many of our colleagues avoid addicts like the plague, and it's even worse if they're based in the banlieue. We were treated like dealers in white coats," says François Brun, who works at a health centre at La Busserine, Marseille.

"The social security had ample warning, but it made no difference," Boulanger says. In many cases the sick became outcasts, victims of a form of social xenophobia.

"At the time there was collective denial. A few of us tried to raise the alarm, but the moment we mentioned Aids and drug addiction, they accused us of playing into the hands of the far right," Coppel explains. With no policy on stopping the spread of Aids – the first schemes for exchanging syringes were only authorised in 1991, with replacement substances following three years later – the Aids virus went on taking a fearful toll. "We wasted five years. It was a hecatomb," Ménard alleges.

The word crops up whenever we talk to those involved during those dark years. How many drug addicts died of Aids on French housing estates? With no official statistics, the phenomenon was ignored for several years. There are just the patchy figures collated by isolated doctors and a few non-government organisations working in the suburbs. "Up to 2000 it was the main cause of death at my Francs-Moisins surgery," Ménard says. Kokoreff, a sociology professor at Paris-VII University, refers to eyewitness accounts gathered in Hauts-de-Seine, at Asnières, Bagneux, Gennevilliers and Nanterre. "On some estates not a single family was spared, either through overdoses, Aids or suicide," he says. "All these deaths are drug-related."

A study commissioned by Orly town council listed 210 heroin users in 1986; 10 years later half of them had died. Delafontaine hospital, a large facility north of Paris, registered 10 such deaths in 1988. Three years later the figure had reached 300. "We had five horrifying years during which 80% of our patients died," says Dr Denis Mechali, a hospital registrar at the time.

But reports by the health authorities make no mention of the death toll. "The first ethnological surveys carried out by the ministry of health highlighted the importance of sharing syringes in the spread of the disease, but little was done to help these underprivileged groups," says Marie Jauffret-Roustide, a researcher at the National Institute of Health and Medical Research (Inserm). She believes the lack of representatives, in contact with the media and policymakers – unlike gay organisations such as Aides or Act Up – was a major disadvantage for youths on the estates. Reda Sadki, who headed the Comité des Familles organisation for many years, endorses this view. "Only in 2001 did posters for the Aids-prevention campaign start featuring coloured or north African people," he says.

Farida Ben Mohamed survived this catastrophe, perhaps because she only started using heroin five years after Nasser. HIV-positive, she is on therapy. The daughter of a Moroccan labourer, she explains that her life changed course one night in October 1980, when her brother was killed by a police officer. Everything went wrong after that. She began using alcohol, cannabis and heroin, wandered from place to place on the Flamants estate and the northern quarters of Marseille, and did time for shoplifting and drug-peddling offences.

Ben Mohamed found out she was HIV-positive in 1993 when she went to a an accident and emergency unit for a sprain. She has been certified as an invalid for the past six years. "I saw everyone from my generation dying off," she says. "I wouldn't be here without my parents, who went out looking for me in the bars." Now prevention schemes are standard practice, but drugs have nevertheless become an industry on some estates. "We mustn't let young people go under, like they did with us," she says. Her tall but emaciated figure, her sunken eyes and jutting cheekbones are testimony to her tragic tale.

Drugs and Sadness in Glasgow's High-Rise Ghettos

The Barracks is one of the most deprived estates in the UK – but it wasn't always so miserable.

Glasgow's Wyndford estate

"There is a tendency for alcoholics and junkies to find each other," says Sean Damer, a Glasgow sociologist. "They bring in their homeless pals and know where they can get legless at 10 o’clock in the morning." The Wyndford estate, known as the Barracks, is one of those places – "an exemplar of everything going wrong with social housing in Britain today," according to Sean. "The Daily Mail and the Sun love to demonise places like this, but this is people’s lives. They have no choice but to make the best of it."

In the 1960s, this was a very different housing scheme. People remember it as a place defined by aspiration and community spirit, a place where you could leave your doors open and families looked out for each other. New residents felt they had “died and gone to heaven”. When many of Glasgow's other tenement blocks were demolished in the 70s, people fought to be allocated a flat on the Wyndford estate. Three references were required – one from the police – before a person was even considered.

Then came the 80s. Estates were sold off and Thatcherite housing legislation, particularly the Tenants Rights Act, seriously limited the powers that housing associations had to evict antisocial tenants. Where once a potential resident's connection to the local area was an important factor in their bid to secure a flat, the Tories' right-to-buy scheme placed a new emphasis on the power of private markets.

In the years since, long-term residents of the Barracks have seen a dramatic change in their surroundings. Now, half the adult population are unemployed and it is in the top 2 percent of the most deprived estates in the UK. The problems are concentrated in four tower blocks on the edge of the Barracks, each standing 26-storeys tall, in which substance abuse is rife – most popular are cocaine, heroin and downers, like diazepam.

"You could ask for drugs right now and they’d be with you in a second," says David, 47, whose balcony overlooks the part of the estate where scenes from Trainspotting were filmed. "There are druggies everywhere. Some of them don’t even live here – people sleep on the landings. I’ve lived in Manchester, Liverpool, Dublin and London and the so-called 'hard men' in these places don’t know they’re born.”

Local man Stephen Cafolla, 44.

This is by no means a problem that is confined to the Barracks. Areas of Glasgow suffer a depth of poverty that is rarely encountered in other parts of the UK. Recent figures released by the Office of National Statistics show that this is the ninth consecutive year that Glasgow has been in the top five workless areas in the UK. In some parts, almost 9 out of 10 male adults are on benefits, while children brought up in social housing now have far fewer life chances than they did half a century ago. They are also more likely to suffer from mental health problems.

Shockingly, life expectancy for men is 54 – almost 20 years less than in the city's more affluent districts just a few miles away. It’s pretty grim and across the board Glaswegian men die young. In the absence of any concrete explanation, researchers and theorists have pointed to an ambiguous "Glasgow effect" – a kind of intrinsic despair that has been passed down through generations since the Industrial revolution and that manifests itself in drug abuse, heavy drinking, a poor diet, ill health and suicide. You could argue that it's also a handy metaphor for a government that is dealing with a problem it has no idea how to fix. With the bedroom tax and other austerity cuts cleaving more than £250m from the Glasgow economy, it's likely that the 36,000 children in Glasgow already living below the poverty line will be soon be joined by others.

Miss Simpson, a resident of 13 years, says, “I just keep my head down, I don’t want to notice it.”

On the Barracks, all the flats in the 26-storey blocks are bedsits that were originally designed for pensioners. However, most of them died in the 80s and 90s and since then, the imperative of the private housing association has been to accept anyone to secure a rent.

Alex, 84, has lived here for 47 years. “When it was first opened there was a queue to get in. Now, they let in everybody. It’s a huge shame, people don’t know each other any more.” Miss Simpson, a resident of 13 years, agrees. “I just keep my head down, I don’t want to notice it.” Another man is picking up litter as part of a community payback scheme. He used to live on the estate and has recently been released from prison. He says, “It was always good, but then it just went crazy."

Sociologist Damer, who's written a feasibility study on the future of the Barracks, talked to me about the problem of drug abuse on the estate. “If people are off their faces, they don’t look after themselves. They are so busy feeding their habit they are not concerned with cleaning the landing or caring for their flat. In the high-density multi-storey flats, for instance, refuse is a big problem. If you are out of your face, dead dogs and whatnot go down the chutes. That happens.”

Jim, 50, who has lived on the 14th floor of one block since 1965, says, "I’ve had a family with a heroin habit across the landing and before them, it was my neighbour from childhood, the contrast was enormous. The addicts wrecked the place. Windows got smashed; there was graffiti and threats. There’s no support. When the caretakers leave at three, we fly alone.”

Every Friday afternoon, a charity bus gives out food and offers a rehab service. Michael Sturrock, coordinator for the Teen Challenge service, says, “We target deprived areas, areas with a high rate of addiction. It became apparent in the last six months that there was a real need on this estate. Each week, the bus is packed. There isn't enough being done to help these people.”

William, 33, has lived in the estate for three years. “It was happy, but it’s not any more. People are getting drunk and taking drugs on the stairs. It gets worse every day. There are too many drugs coming in."

Some of the other tall concrete slabs in the city are due to be demolished by 2017. Many think that this is an option for the Barracks, so far has the estate fallen since its halcyon days. “The bedsit flats are not suitable. Either they must come down or they must be reconfigured," says Patricia Ferguson, Labour MSP for Glasgow Maryhill. "They need investment and they need to be made into decent housing in which people want to live." Ferguson thinks that the coalition is guilty of social neglect: “I don’t think the government understands the area and I suspect it cares even less.”

Others feel differently. David MacKenzie, from local housing authority Cube, says, “We have confidence in the estate – we know it has a long-term future. It has its share of poverty and unemployment like many parts of Glasgow, but it’s definitely an area on the up.” After decades of little or no investment since the 80s, they say a regeneration project is now underway.

Unlike London, for residents on Glasgow estates, regeneration isn’t about middle-class outsiders moving in to force out native working-class populations. For people here, this is about making life less nightmarish. It’s about new heating systems to combat dampness and fuel poverty, money advisors to help tenants on the breadline and janitor schemes for young locals who can’t find work. The police have increased their patrols in the area and extended the CCTV systems.

However, it is too much for them to kick in every door in the hope of finding drugs. For many residents in the high-rise blocks, this is too little, too late. Comments range from, “I need outta here, this is the absolute gutter, pure shite,” and, "You wouldn’t put your dog in it,” to, “They're cleaning it up, but it’s a hard, unforgiving place." Whatever the view, for now, for many on the Barracks and other estates in Scotland, the hope of finding a job and a better future remains a distant one.

The Guardians coverage on Lorraine Dunbar.

Playwright's darkest visions return to consume her family · Writer's daughter jailed for manslaughter · Drug abuse of boy aged 2 became routine in hostel View more sharing options Shares 0 Martin Wainwright Saturday 24 November 2007 23.56 GMT The bleak world of a council estate playwright who took London's theatre world by storm has returned to haunt her family with the death of her toddler grandson from a teaspoon of heroin substitute. The darkest visions of Andrea Dunbar, a single mother whose play Rita, Sue and Bob Too was made famous by the Royal Court theatre in 1982, engulfed her family and ended in the death of two-year-old Harris Dunbar last July.

The child's mother, Samaya Rafiq, daughter of Dunbar, who died in 1990 after collapsing in a Bradford pub aged 29, was jailed for three years yesterday after admitting manslaughter.

The stories you need to read, in one handy email Read more Bradford crown court heard she had allowed the boy to play with bottles of methadone until he developed a craving for the drug, and the heroin and crack cocaine which she took in front of him.

The court heard that the relentlessly pessimistic vision of Samaya's mother, who recorded drug-taking, crime and casual sex on the Buttershaw estate, became reality for her daughter.

Known as Lorraine Dunbar until she converted to Islam, Rafiq turned to drugs and prostitution after her mother's death led to her being taken into care.

Her barrister, Mukhtar Hussain QC, said in mitigation before sentencing: "She began taking drugs when she herself was a child. Her mother had left her money but when that ran out she turned to prostitution and crime to fund her habit." Like Andrea Dunbar, who spent 18 months in a refuge for battered women and had her three children by different fathers, Rafiq ended up in a hostel, where the drug abuse of her son became routine.

Andrew Robertson QC, prosecuting, said: "When a friend challenged her about letting Harris play with the bottles, she responded with words to the effect that there was no harm in it. Hair tests confirmed that in the last four months of his life, Harris had actually ingested methadone in not insignificant amounts.

"One witness described him screaming and holding his arms out as his mother took her dose as if he wanted some."

The toddler was found apparently lifeless on a bed at the hostel and was pronounced dead at Bradford royal infirmary. A postmortem found the equivalent of 358mg of methadone a litre in the boy's tissues, with additional traces of heroin and crack cocaine in his hair.

His DNA was found on three of Samaya's six methadone bottles and he had also drunk from a bottle of anti-depressant.

The pathetic circumstances had many echoes of Andrea Dunbar's work, which was catapulted to fame after she met the Royal Court's director, Max Stafford-Clark, at the home of her social worker in the Brontë tourist village of Haworth, near Bradford. Her graphic portrayal of what was newly known at the time as the "underclass", a short play called The Arbour, was a cause celebre at the Court.

Even greater success came with Rita, Sue and Bob Too, which became a successful film. As well as giving a clear-eyed vision of the dismal life of many people on Buttershaw, she caught a mood by consigning the cheery, pipe-sucking world of flat-capped northerners to the dustbin.

Dunbar was equally celebrated for not having her head turned and refusing to leave Buttershaw, but her lifestyle led to serious ill-health and eventually a fatal brain haemorrhage. She made no bones about believing that most of her neighbours were forced to put their own interests first in the struggle to get by.

Passing sentence, the recorder, Judge Stephen Gullick, told Rafiq: "Your doubtless overwhelming desire to satisfy your own needs meant you totally failed to carry out your duty as a parent to protect your son from harm."

Richard Bates, head of children's services for Bradford council, said: "An independent review undertaken by the local safeguarding children board will be identifying any lessons that can be learned from this tragic case."

A fresh take on social class from the experts behind the BBC's 'Great British Class Survey'.

Why does social class matter more than ever in Britain today? How has the meaning of class changed? What does this mean for social mobility and inequality?

In this book Mike Savage and the team of sociologists responsible for the Great British Class Survey look beyond the labels to explore how and why our society is changing and what this means for the people who find themselves in the margins as well as in the centre.

Their new conceptualization of class is based on the distribution of three kinds of capital - economic (inequalities in income and wealth), social (the different kinds of people we know) and cultural (the ways in which our leisure and cultural preferences are exclusive) - and provides incontrovertible evidence that class is as powerful and relevant today as it's ever been.

Inequality is more than just economics, it is the culture that divides and makes social mobility almost impossible. Leading geographer Danny Dorling goes in pursuit of the latest research into how the lives and ideas of the 1% impact on the remaining 99%; and the findings are shocking. Inequality in the UK is increasing; more and more people are driven towards the poverty line. Even before birth, being born outside the 1% will have dramatic impact on the rest of your life: it will reduce your life expectancy, educational and work prospects, as well as your mental health. In this book, filled with illustrations and infographics that bring the facts to life, Dorling convincingly proves that the cost of the super rich is just too high for us.

Over the past two centuries or so, capitalism has undergone continual change - economic cycles that lurch from boom to bust - and has always emerged transformed and strengthened. Surveying this turbulent history, Paul Mason wonders whether today we are on the brink of a change so big, so profound, that this time capitalism itself, the immensely complex system by which entire societies function, has reached its limits and is changing into something wholly new.

Trending Blogs

Recently Viewed Blogs

SKETCHBOOK