“Homerton Hospital keeps Hackney alive and well, many were even born there. Let’s show it some love,” says STIK.
The words have the plainness of everything the artist makes — no flourish, no irony, just the two lonely dots of eyes and the flat line of a mouth that have become, over fifteen-odd years of Hackney walls and hoardings, one of the most recognisable images to come out of east London. And now they carry a fundraising appeal. A rare signed set of his prints is going under the hammer at Bonhams this week, with every penny bound for the NHS trust that runs the hospital on Homerton Row.
The lot is Holding Hands (Red, Yellow, Orange, Blue and Teal), a complete set of five offset lithographs from 2020, each sheet 50 centimetres square and each signed by the artist in black ink. It is, the catalogue notes, one of only a handful of signed sets set aside from the unsigned edition, printed with two centrefolds and offered as full, unframed sheets. The set comes with a copy of the 2015 monograph STIK, published by Century, signed and dedicated — and with one of the artist’s stick figures drawn straight onto the cover in black marker pen.
The image is pure STIK: a row of his simple, big-eyed figures, hands clasped, rendered in five colourways that read at a glance as a crowd holding itself together. It is the kind of picture that says a great deal with almost nothing, which is rather the point.
The provenance line is short and generous. The work was donated by the artist directly to Homerton Healthcare NHS Foundation Trust, and the full hammer price and the buyer’s premium — the slice auction houses normally keep for themselves — will go to the trust, registered charity number 1061659. Bidding is running through Bonhams’ Prints and Multiples online sale, which closes at midday on 9 July.
For STIK, giving work to the Homerton is not a one-off gesture but something closer to a habit. Back in 2015 he released his Sleeping Baby print at the hospital itself, a hand-pulled silkscreen edition of a hundred that sold out on a first-come-first-served basis and raised around £50,000 for the trust. That image went on to have a second life entirely: adopted as a kind of mascot on the placards of junior doctors as they marched on Westminster. A drawing made for a maternity ward became, briefly, the face of a national dispute — which tells you something about how far a STIK figure can travel from the wall it started on.
There is a neat symmetry to the fact that the artist keeps returning to the place where, as he says, so many of his neighbours drew their first breath. The Homerton is not a landmark in the way the Empire or the Town Hall are landmarks. It is somewhere you end up rather than somewhere you set out for — for a birth, a break, a scare, a recovery. STIK’s figures, holding hands in five colours, are a fair portrait of what a hospital actually is: a lot of frightened, hopeful people, keeping hold of one another, waiting to be made alive and well again.
STIK’s Holding Hands (Red, Yellow, Orange, Blue and Teal) is Lot 128 in Bonhams’ Prints and Multiples online sale (auction 32238). Bidding closes at 12 noon BST on 9 July 2026. The full hammer price and buyer’s premium will be donated to Homerton Healthcare NHS Foundation Trust.
