One day, while staring at a painting by Jez Prior, it’s called Star Nursery (above). I thought it would make a nice scarf for a friend of mine. She refuses to dress down…it made a great scarf.

Sometimes I wonder if I should just get a job. Then I realise that I can’t. Not while I have the luxury of doing something I believe in. What started out as a chance for a friend and myself to get some experience in event management, now has us (us is me, and people that fit the laex ethos ) developing a product for a launch in December.

With friends, we organise art events, exhibitions, auctions, workspace installations, promote artists and have fun exploring the modern art scene, interviewing artists, filming it and put it up on our blog, always with a connection to a charity, project or cause.

I’ve said before, and quite possibly will say again been, that I think there is an itch in society. Fair trade coffee and bananas, crowd sourcing, beer supporting prostate cancer research, ‘charitea’. It’s easy to believe that that reflects a need in society to support things we feel need support. To be more than a slave to the economy. To see a change from what the economy has become. To be a part of what it could become. A tool, rather than a master. This is what happens when you teach people to read. They want more.

So, for the next faze of our start up, we are having some incredibly beautiful and intriguing fine art paintings reproduced as silk scarves. The idea is to have a percentage of the retail price going to the artist and a percentage going to a social or ecological project.

      

      

      

Above, some of Jez’s paintings that we are considering for the project.

Ethical consumerism has been on the rise for decades, as we become more aware of social and ecological issues and more aware of our real democratic influence, spending power. Could we really live in a world where change, of our consideration, is driven by consumerism? Where we made a choice, not only of products but of their ethical and environmental affiliations. Enough influence and the big corporations would chase us by offering us what we want, it just depends if enough of us want the same things. And why should someone do it for us? There is a lot of talk about the economy and the way in which it’s structured. If we want change, what better way to change it than living in the world we want to live in. Heady stuff.

It’s an entrepreneurial world today, with more and more of us waking up to the possibilities, so why not work with that? Working out of the Impact HUB Westminster, a start up center on Haymarket, we meet many like minded people who want to live in a better organised world, where their ambitions and efforts have more positive implications. Not a high minded moral stance, more a desire be to busy with something that engages us and fits those moral ideas we have floating around our heads.

Of course, there have been and will be challenges, there always will be, especially when running you’re own business, but they are challenges not problems and so, more satisfying when you solve them.

I have to say though, for all the aggravation involved, I prefer to be running a start up, and supporting the things that I think are important, than just doing something to pay the rent.