Shelters House of Cards campaign aimed in inspire change and help the homeless community by uniting the public and renowned artists to create artwork in response to the issue. The collection aims to shed light and inspire more people to help with the UK’s housing crisis. The campaign video by Shelter saw a unstable and weak ‘house of cards’ falling apart, representing family structure and the fragility of the UK housing crisis. The blank templates for the playing cards were put up all across the UK in hopes to bring together the communities they were placed in. I found the project quite interesting because no prompts were given to the public in terms of design or meaning, but many of the templates were filled with amazing messages, visuals and graphics. All of the cards came out very different and personal to each creator which i think is essentially what the whole project is about- united through differences and interchanging situations.Many of these original artworks were stolen, some resold, which shows that their aims of uniting the UK communities might not have completely worked in their favour- but some pieces were recovered and sold in aid of Shelter.

A 53rd card was added to the standard 52 card deck, which was made by a member of the public and was exhibited alongside them. I think this symbolises us breaking the system, inclusion and igniting change in our society, which is an amazing message for the UK right now. A new card suit of the ‘house’ was created making it the 5th symbol which was shown of course both upwards + downwards to represent the image of the collapsing house in the campaign video. Harrods requested exclusivity of the collection and sit sold for over £150,000- all going to Shelter. After the campaign there was a 1600% increase in online discussion surrounding the issue of homelessness and helped to discuss several new government initiatives to prevent repossession.  I really love this whole project, it was for an amazing cause and it accomplished a lot for the homeless community.