Friday, April 27, 2018

"the artist who sketches under cover at arms fairs"

TG:
Armed with a discreet notebook and pen, Gibbon aims to penetrate the “veneer of respectability” she says cloaks such events, revealing the vulnerabilities of those who make a living selling weapons of mass destruction. These include: the sales rep vomiting after starting on the champagne at 11am, the young woman in the tight dress bringing an incongruous glamour to a Scud missile stand, the string quartet serenading bomb-makers on the back of a military truck and the mannequins wearing gas masks.

...

She got in using her real name but gave her occupation as “war artist” and said she wanted to practise drawing military hardware. The trick worked for a few years until an unusually observant security guard noticed that she was sketching not tanks but arms dealers. She protested her innocence but he was having none of it. “If you’re a war artist why don’t you go to Iraq and draw?” he said, and escorted her to the exit.

Unwilling to give up, she took the drastic measure of changing her name by deed poll to get back in. She also created a sham company and website to make her look legitimate. Her new fake identity was a passport to arms fairs all around the world until
Her book is available for preorder.