Billy Childish is spending the summer occupying two worlds that don’t always sit comfortably together.
On one hand, a painting by the artist is currently hanging in The Sun and The Moon at the Saatchi Gallery, surrounded by the sort of institutional framing that once seemed unlikely for one of Britain’s most stubborn cultural outsiders. On the other, he’s releasing a hand-pulled woodcut through L-13 and publishing a new Vipers Tongue poetry pamphlet that looks resolutely uninterested in the mechanics of the contemporary art market.
The contrast is part of the appeal. Childish has never been especially interested in polishing the rough edges off his work for wider consumption, which is perhaps why his arrival in blue-chip cultural spaces still feels faintly anomalous.
Coinciding with the summer solstice, L-13 has released a new three-colour woodcut printed on its ancient Albion Press. Limited to just 31 copies, signed, numbered and marked with Childish’s gallows symbol, it’s the kind of object that feels refreshingly out of step with an era of frictionless digital everything and endlessly multiplied editions.
Alongside it comes tHe Whole shiT CaN, The 32-page publication collects new poems and self-portraits in Childish’s trademark cut-and-paste style. The first 50 copies are signed and numbered, while the title itself suggests that tact remains low on the artist’s list of priorities.
That has always been the attraction of Vipers Tongue. While much contemporary poetry arrives wrapped in endorsements, launch events and professionalised branding, Childish’s pamphlets retain the atmosphere of something made because it needed to exist, not because a marketing department decided it should. They often feel less like literary products than dispatches from an ongoing one-man publishing operation.
The timing of these releases is notable. As Childish appears in one of London’s biggest summer exhibitions, he’s simultaneously putting out work through the same DIY channels he’s used for decades. No reinvention, no strategic pivot, no sudden embrace of cultural respectability. Just another painting, another print, another pamphlet.
In 2026, that kind of consistency feels almost provocative.
words Alexa Wang
