UK Textile artist Lucy Sparrow is launching her latest installation, The Warmongery at the Boxpark, featuring an arsenal of felt guns, knives, pistols and explosives as well as a range of biological and chemical weapons, dispensed from sweetshop jars.

Purchasers of weapons are receiving a felt firearm licence while shop assistants in full biohazard suits were checking visitors to The Warmongery for traces of radiation and bacteria.

Sparrow comments, “The aim of The Warmongery is to draw people’s attention to what drives a few individuals to stockpile weapons and to ask why people are growing up in a world where a tiny minority feel so stressed and frustrated that they want to kill people. Although the exhibition isn’t intended to be a glorification of guns, what is clear is that obesity, alcohol, tobacco and drugs claim far more lives than firearms do in our high-stress society. Rather than banning guns we should look at better mental health treatment because if people are stressed they will always find a way to unleash their distress. The Warmongery hopes to decouple the subject of guns from mental illness.”

View the full set of pics here

Lucy Sparrow’s Warmongery
Until 17 May 2015
BOXPARK, 2 Bethnal Green Road
London E1 6GY