This project examines the issue of legal proprietorship and how the UK assigns legal personhood and citizenship on an individual, through a reimagining of the Paddington Bear narrative, a character created in response to Britain’s World War 2 child evacuees. Through deliberate acts of détournement, copyright infringement, humour and subversion with bureaucratic replication, Paddington is reframed as a clandestine arrival on a small boat, claiming asylum and facing the threat of deportation. Presented as a mock barrister’s case file and legal bundle - containing cover sheets, witness statements, exhibits, application forms, notices and a legislation volume - the work critiques copyright and immigration law. Despite the legal system’s neutrality, this project exposes the rigidity and dispassionate strictness that de-personalises, and reduces individuals to a series of numbers, categories, case files, officialdom, and procedures. In doing so this project returns to the idiom that the law is an ass.

The original source material is a unique typescript of Paddington Goes to Town, authored and annotated by Michael Bond, which sits in the Oxford Bodleian Library. The typescript is bound with two split pins in a modest brown carboard wrapper, a practical utilitarian structure reflecting its working draft nature, and providing a template for the projects own administrative formats, bindings and evidentiary aesthetics.

Much like the Situationist with the practice of detournement, this body of work doesn’t merely retell Paddington, it uses legal forms and systems to show how the State rewrites, removes, de-personalises an individual. Subversion ultimately becomes a diagnostic tool whereby Paddington is re-constituted. Paddington is culturally coded as harmless, comic and a paragon of civility - my subversion tests what happens when that innocence is processed by the neutral but hostile logic of administration and bureaucracy, before the blindfolded Lady Justice – a symbol of fairness, balance and the enforcement of the law.

From a beloved character we inevitably witness Paddington’s marked shift to a legal subject, where identity is reduced to evidence, case, risk, number and file.