The Nigel Farage commemorative plate

Introducing Rakewell, Apollo’s wandering eye on the art world. Look out for regular posts taking a rakish perspective on art and museum stories.

An unusual commemorative plate has recently come to Rakewell’s attention. Cardiff-based artist Mark James has produced a plate (and also a badge) depicting the scene of Nigel Farage, the former leader of UKIP, emerging from the wreckage of a light-aircraft crash in 2010.

‘This isn’t about wishing anyone dead. It’s about how different things would have been in this country – and Europe – right now if things had turned out differently on that first Thursday of May in 2010,’ James told Wales Online. ‘Nigel Farage has been instrumental in creating so many of our modern-day problems and has divided the country like never before’.

UKIP’s reaction has been less meditative. A spokesman for the party said, ‘Meh. The startling and groundbreaking courage of this potter cannot be over estimated. He has a constant desire for controversy as his boasting biography makes clear.’

This isn’t Farage’s first brush with art – he was at school with the artist Jeremy Deller (who remembers him as ‘totally chauvinistic’. And he does seem to have boastful biographical plans of his own. ‘I’m like Picasso,’ he was quoted as saying in a New Yorker profile last year, when he was presented with a cartoon of himself at a party. ‘When I am dead, I’m going to be worth a fortune.’

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