To celebrate the inaugural Pulse Fringe Festival in June 2011, in association with Southsea Food Festival and Portsmouth Festivities, Aspex commissioned Hannah Rhodes to create portraits of regulars in pubs around Southsea. Hannah graduated from the Arts University College at Bournemouth with a BA in Visual Communication, and now specialises in illustration and graphic design.

EDIT: The display has actually been taken down now, but hannah has informed us that the beer mats will be distributed to pubs in the next couple of days. Keep your eyes out and send us a photo of your drink and and a beer mat if your lucky enough to get one.

Over the course of a day Hannah visited several pubs in Southsea and got into conversation with their regulars, capturing images and quotes that she then transferred onto a beer mat format. The beer mats will be printed and distributed to pubs in the Southsea area, for people to use as they were always intended, or to take away as miniature artworks. To promote the project a display of enlarged versions of Hannah’s artwork has been put together in one of Debenhams’ shop windows on Osborne Road in Southsea for the next two weeks.