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A conversation with Sickboy: the man behind the Temple

One of Britain’s most enduring street artists brings a major new exhibition to North Norfolk, exploring hope, history and the objects that carry us through dark times.

Lee Webster from Urban Art Store sat down with Sickboy to talk about love, loss, Banksy, buried treasure and his new exhibition, Fair Warning at Bishop & Miller.

Long before street art became a commodity traded in auction houses and collected by hedge fund managers, a Bristol-based artist called Sickboy was painting his now-iconic Temple motif across the walls of Britain’s cities.

For more than two decades, that symbol, a bold graphic structure that speaks of both permanence and transience, has appeared on trains, underpasses, gallery walls and, soon, across the landscape of North Norfolk itself.

Born Charlie, Sickboy is one of the figures who helped shape a generation of British street art from the ground up. Not as a follower of a scene, but as one of its architects. He was among the first to move beyond the tag and develop a distinctive visual motif, a shift that helped define the transition from graffiti as vandalism to graffiti as art.

His peers from those early years include some of the most recognisable names in contemporary art, though Sickboy is clear that he walks his own path.

From Bristol streets to North Norfolk

Sickboy came of age in Bristol at the precise moment the city’s streets became a proving ground for some of the most significant art of the late twentieth century.

Alongside Banksy, with whom he has a well-documented history, and others who would go on to define the street art canon, he developed his practice in an environment where risk was real and recognition came slowly, if at all.

His Temple motif became a recurring presence across the urban landscape in Bristol, London and far beyond. Unlike the political provocation that would become Banksy’s trademark, Sickboy’s iconography operates in a more philosophical register, circling themes he has always returned to: love, peace, happiness and death.

The Temple, with its architectural resonance and suggestion of both sanctuary and ruin, carries all of these tensions at once.

For more on the continuing impact of street art in the region, read our piece on Banksy’s Spraycation and how street art put Norfolk and Suffolk on the global map.

A career built on objects, energy and memory

Sickboy featured in Banksy’s landmark film and was part of the Santa’s Ghetto shows, the irreverent, sell-out pop-up exhibitions that helped bring street art into gallery spaces and forced the mainstream art world to pay attention.

He was also represented through Pictures on Walls, the print publisher that brought affordable editions of street art to a new generation of collectors and helped establish the market that now sustains the scene.

Sickboy’s own collection, accumulated over decades of travelling, buying and trading, is itself a kind of artwork. It is a physical map of cultural enthusiasms that ranges from rare vinyl to antiques and beyond.

It both sustains his practice financially and feeds it intellectually. His house, he says, is “like a show and tell”, a space where objects exist in conversation with each other and with the art he makes.

“Objects carry energy. They absorb the stories of the people who owned them and the moments they’ve lived through.”

Fair Warning at Bishop & Miller

Now, Sickboy turns his attention to North Norfolk and to what promises to be one of the most distinctive exhibitions the region has seen.

Fair Warning opens at Bishop & Miller in Glandford, North Norfolk, with a private view on 18 June 2026. The exhibition then runs from 19 June to 5 July 2026, launching a new dedicated contemporary exhibition space at what was, until recently, a traditional auction house.

The transformation of Bishop & Miller, a specialist fine art and antiques firm with salerooms in Stowmarket and Glandford, into a contemporary art space is itself part of the story.

Sickboy arrived with energy, a vision and a willingness to operate on his own terms. The company’s response was to reimagine what the space could be.

“They’ve basically gone, we’re going to close this auction house and turn it into a gallery,” he says, with evident satisfaction.

This shift also connects to a wider conversation about the future of regional art spaces, something we explored recently in how regional galleries are reinventing themselves to survive.

Positivity out of adversity

The conceptual framing of Fair Warning is characteristically ambitious.

The show has grown out of what Sickboy describes as a focus on “positivity out of adversity”, a survey of moments in cultural history when art, music and design emerged from darkness as acts of defiance and renewal.

“Art Deco came off the back of World War One,” he explains, “and people wanted to start doing all of that, the whole decadent theme, the expressiveness. People wanted to come out and be like that instead of just getting smashed by armour.”

The exhibition spotlights twenty items and topics from the twenty-first century and earlier, each acting as a case study in the human capacity to create beauty, imagination and community from catastrophe.

Bishop & Miller describe the exhibition as the beginning of a space where contemporary artists can respond directly to the extraordinary objects and histories that pass through the auction house.

Sickboy, with his legacy of creating immersive environments, is the perfect artist to open that conversation.

A treasure hunt across Norfolk

But Fair Warning does not begin inside the gallery.

In one of the most inventive public art gestures Norfolk has seen, Sickboy has broken apart his Temple symbol, the motif that has been the spine of his practice for over two decades, into seven pieces.

Each fragment has been placed inside a specially made wooden box and hidden at an undisclosed location across the county. The public are invited to find them.

Clues will be released through Sickboy’s Instagram and social media channels, sending searchers out into the Norfolk landscape on a trail that is part treasure hunt, part conceptual artwork and part community event.

Those who find a fragment will be invited to bring it to the exhibition’s opening event, where all seven pieces will be reunited in a live act of collective assembly.

“I liked the idea of creating something that couldn’t exist until a group of strangers came together,” Sickboy says. “Each fragment has its own journey, but the work is only complete when people choose to share what they’ve found.”

The completed work, titled Fair Warning Unity Temple, will then remain on display as part of the exhibition, carrying within it the stories of the people and the landscape that helped bring it into being.

It is a typically Sickboy gesture: conceptually rigorous, formally elegant and fundamentally about connection.

Around the corner of something dark, there is light

“The whole show is about riffing off items,” Sickboy explains. “Spotlighting positivity out of adversity, and letting people know that around the corner of something dark, there’s some light. That’s within human nature and spirit because otherwise these things would not happen.”

When asked what still feels unfinished, his answer is unexpectedly personal.

“I feel like health is unfinished,” he says. “If I am healthier physically, purer, that, as a self-project, is the best thing I do.”

Fair Warning opens at Bishop & Miller, Glandford, North Norfolk from 19 June to 5 July 2026.

The private view takes place on 18 June 2026. RSVP via Sickboy’s website.

Follow Sickboy on Instagram for treasure hunt clue releases.