Martin Firrell is a British contemporary artist known for public artworks on billboards around the world. He uses the poster form to campaign for greater social equality. His bold and simple texts address LGBT+ equality, the women’s movement, feminism and gender equality; and universal human rights. The artist's aim is 'to make the world more humane'. Firrell's billboards often resemble advertising because he hijacks advertising's techniques to achieve artistic-activist ends. This co-opting of commercial techniques and his wholesale colonisation of advertising’s oldest and boldest medium - the billboard - makes Firrell one of the most apposite and significant artists of the 21st Century. ~ Dr Robert Shelton.
Pronouns are political. Labels can be a liberation. Pronouns like ‘they/them’ and 'ze/zir', and labels like ‘bi', 'gay', and ‘dyke’, celebrated in public space, champion the visibility and validity of all LGBT+ identities.
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Embrace lesbianism / Reject male supremacy / Overthrow the social order / Renounce the monster male
London UK, 2017
For the 50th anniversary of the 1967 Sexual Offences Act. Both the gay liberation and women’s movements of the 1960s agreed that liberation of the sexes could only be achieved by ‘eliminating the social pressures on men and women to conform to narrowly defined gender roles’.
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Sex shop
Soho, London UK, 2005
Vinyl lettering broadcasts the invitation 'Touch Me Inappropriately', identifying and encouraging the taboo of illicit sexual contact in a public place (perhaps as a means of alleviating social isolation).
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Butt shot
Found footage, 2025
Regarding men as objects of sexual desire is a queer hobby and a political act. Women have been similarly objectified for years. This is what gender equality looks like.
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Glad you came
Pride marches across Europe, 2025
As LGBT+ rights are challenged or rolled back in some parts of the world, the LGBT+ community gathers at Pride marches across Europe. Coming together, especially in challenging times, is an act of resistance.
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Beware of boys
Re-edited found footage, 2021
Anti LGBT+ propaganda of the 1960s often presented homosexuality as a mental illness. It was also not unusual for homosexuality to be conflated with sadism and paedophilia. Found footage, titled
Boys Beware,
is re-edited so it is the young hitchhiker who is predatory, taking advantage of a wholly reasonable and friendly older driver.
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Non Binary
London UK, 2024
Non-binary identities have been recognised for millennia by different cultures around the world. Inanna was a Mesopotamian goddess believed to have the power to change a person’s gender.
Her followers were noted in the ancient world for their gender-fluid identities, blurring or confounding the gender binary.
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Trans inclusive feminism loves you
Pride across Europe, 2025
Transgender people show us how arbitrary gender identities really are and how we all have governance over our own lives.
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What oppresses us shapes our desires
London UK, 2022
French feminist theory of the 1970s suggested that any oppressor, by definition, has the power to shape all of the responses of the oppressed, including what the oppressed come to regard as erotic or desirable.
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How to be popular
Re-edited found footage, 2021
A 1947 public information film advises young people how to be popular, largely by conforming to societal expectations of gender roles and parental authority. The re-edited version queers the protagonists so that the 'boy meets girl' story takes a subversive turn.
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Valerie Solanas shoots artist
Manipulated newsprint, 2023
When Valerie Solanas shot Andy Warhol, the newspaper headline didn't even refer to her by name. Solanas has since been recognised as perhaps the most important name in 20th-century radical feminist theory. The reworked newsprint reflects this change in Solanas's status.
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Homosexuals are still revolting
London UK, 2020
77 countries still criminalise private, consensual same-sex relationships putting LGBT+ people at risk of blackmail, arrest, prosecution, imprisonment and, in at least five countries, death by execution.
