Dead Children Playing

Dead Children Playing collects a body of paintings and prints Stanley Donwood made between 2003 and 2006, appropriating the flat lettering of British road signage and the blunt language of wartime propaganda to answer the rhetoric of the war on terror.

Black grounds are stencilled over with slogans and warnings lifted from official signage and government messaging, arranged like a city of hoardings gone wrong. The title itself is cut from a British road sign reading "dead slow, children playing," trimmed down to something closer to a headline. The book was published by Verso in 2007 as an 80-page hardcover, and several of the works were made jointly with Dr. Tchock, a pseudonym under which Donwood and Radiohead's Thom Yorke have collaborated since the late 1990s.

Donwood has been Radiohead's resident visual artist since The Bends in 1995, producing the artwork for every album through Hail to the Thief and beyond, work that draws on the same vocabulary of warning signs, maps and official typography assembled here. His practice moves between painting, printmaking, album design and land art, and this book presents that protest imagery as a standalone artist's publication rather than as sleeve art.