STIK print raises over £4,000 for the Homerton

“Homerton Hospital keeps Hackney alive and well, many were even born there. Let’s show it some love,” said STIK.

The public duly obliged. A rare signed set of the artist’s prints has sold at Bonhams for £4,096 including premium, with every penny bound (see below) for the NHS trust that runs the hospital on Homerton Row.

The lot was Holding Hands (Red, Yellow, Orange, Blue & Teal), a complete set of five offset lithographs in colours from 2020, printed on smooth wove paper, each sheet 500 by 500 millimetres and signed by the artist in black ink. 

It was one of only a few signed sets aside from the unsigned edition, with two centrefolds as issued and offered as full, unframed sheets. 

The set came with a copy of the 2015 monograph STIK, published by Century, London, signed and dedicated — and with one of the artist’s stick figures drawn straight onto the cover page in black marker pen.

The image is a row of his simple, big-eyed figures, hands clasped, rendered in five colourways that read at a glance as a crowd holding itself together. 

The work was donated by the artist directly to Homerton Healthcare NHS Foundation Trust, and both the full hammer price and the buyer’s premium — the slice auction houses normally keep for themselves — went to the trust. It sold through Bonhams’ Prints and Multiples online sale.

For STIK, giving work to the Homerton is not a one-off gesture – it’s more a habit. Back in 2015 he released his Sleeping Baby print at the hospital itself, a hand-pulled silkscreen edition of a hundred that sold out on a first-come-first-served basis and raised around £50,000 for the trust. 

That image went on to have a second life entirely: adopted as a kind of mascot on the placards of junior doctors as they marched on Westminster. A drawing made for a maternity ward became, briefly, the face of a national dispute.

The artist keeps returning to the place where so many of his neighbours drew their first breath. The Homerton is not a landmark in the way the Empire or the Town Hall are landmarks. It is somewhere you end up rather than somewhere you set out for — for a birth, a break, a scare, a recovery. 

STIK’s figures, holding hands, are a fair portrait of a hospital: a lot of hopeful people, keeping hold of one another, waiting to be made well again.

STIK’s Holding Hands (Red, Yellow, Orange, Blue & Teal) sold for £4,096 including premium at Bonhams (Lot 128, auction 32238). The full proceeds were donated to Homerton Healthcare NHS Foundation Trust.