Chelsea-Louise Berlin
Artist | Author | Cultural Archivist
Publishing Practice
Tart Art
Drawn from The Berlin Collection, Tart Art presents some of the earliest and rarest hand-drawn tart cards found in London telephone boxes during the late 1980s. Collected and archived by Chelsea-Louise Berlin over several decades, these cards form a unique visual record of informal graphic production, labour, and desire within public space.
The publication examines the graphic language of the cards, tracing how imagery evolved through borrowing, repetition, and adaptation from existing visual sources.
Berlin reflects on where the cards were found across London, and how their design, placement, and content mirrored the social conditions and desires of the time.
Alongside critical commentary, Tart Art reproduces more than 300 original cards in full colour, preserving objects that were never intended to survive.
Presented across 192 pages, the book functions as both archive and cultural document, offering insight into a largely undocumented visual economy of the late twentieth century.
The limited-edition hardback is issued with four alternative dust-cover designs.
Rave Art
Rave Art documents the emergence of rave culture from the mid- to late 1980s, tracing its influence on music, graphic design, fashion, language, and wider social structures.
With music originating in the United States, then formed and shaped in the UK, rave culture developed through grassroots networks of dancers, artists, designers, and organisers who used music and visual language as tools for expression and connection.
Initially rooted in small underground clubs, the movement rapidly expanded into large-scale events attended by tens of thousands of people. House music, new technologies, and changing patterns of communication played a central role in this growth. Word-of-mouth, pagers, telephone networks, and printed flyers formed an informal but highly effective system of information exchange.
Drawing on The Berlin Collection, Rave Art focuses on flyers as both communication tools and graphic artefacts. Often produced quickly and distributed freely, these designs evolved into a distinctive visual language, reflecting the urgency, optimism, and collective energy of the scene.
The publication brings together hundreds of rare and significant examples, many of which were never intended to be preserved.
Berlin’s firsthand involvement in the early rave scene informs the book’s perspective, situating the material within its original social and cultural context.
Presented as both archive and narrative, Rave Art offers insight into a movement that reshaped contemporary culture and remains one of the most influential youth-led creative moments of the late twentieth century.
Available from all good booksellers, online shops and major art galleries/museum shops.
Revised 3rd edition available in all good book shops, museums and online.
The Bench
"Moments in the life of an inanimate object"
The Bench is a long-term photographic project produced over a four-year period. Photographed each evening at dusk, the images were taken without staging, direction, or intervention. Figures appear only in silhouette, allowing the focus to remain on gesture, proximity, and the passage of time rather than individual identity.
The work documents what unfolds in, around, and through a single inanimate object during the rhythms of everyday life. By removing narrative specificity, The Bench invites the viewer to imagine the stories embedded within each moment, treating the bench as a silent witness to routine, intimacy, solitude, and transition.
Positioned between observation and projection, the project explores the relationship between humans, objects, and shared space.
Through repetition and duration, the bench becomes a constant against which social behaviour, movement, and presence are quietly recorded.
The resulting images function as both documentation and metaphor, reflecting on memory, absence, and the accumulation of lived experience
