Jealous Gallery is pleased to announce the first exhibition of the Comedy Carpet Off Cuts. Adorning the walls of the gallery will be the remains from the production of Europe's largest piece of public artwork. The gallery will be showing a selection of the letters and characters used to make the work, along with other documentation of the works conception and creation.

Created by artist Gordon Young, and designed in collaboration with Why Not Associates, the Comedy Carpet is a celebration of comedy on an extraordinary scale. Referring to the work of more than 1,000 comedians and comedy writers, the carpet gives visual form to jokes, songs and catchphrases dating from the early days of variety to the present. Sited in front of Blackpool Tower, the 2200m2 work of art contains over 160,000 granite letters embedded into concrete.

Gordon Young is one of the UKs’ leading forces in public art, creating environments in which individuals can engage and communicate with works and each other. His work breaks down boundaries and offers the viewer a new experience by immersing them in a changed public environment. The inclusive and accessible element that is inherent in the nature of Youngs’ work has found its way to Jealous previously teaming up with Andy Altman for their Comedy Carpet print. Young has worked with Andy Altman and Why Not Associates’ for a number of years. Andy is one of the worlds leading typography designers truly understanding the beauty of text and the effect that it can have on a reader perceptions of content.

The letters that form the carpet are made of 30mm solid granite, which were then cast into high-quality concrete panels. Using new techniques and materials, Young created a specialist factory and recruited a production team for the manufacture of the letters. From the cutting of these letters in many differing fonts and sizes, the process generated literally tons of wonderful waste granite in a variety of typographic shapes and forms, which now form part of the exhibition ‘Comedy Carpet Off-Cuts’ at Jealous Gallery.

This exhibition gives you the opportunity to own one of these unique covetable fragments, which were produced to create the largest and funniest typographic monument in the world. Exhibited alongside the letter fragments will be film footage, a documentary book, photographs and a screenprint edition produced in the Jealous Print Studio 'Comedy Carpet Off-Cuts' gives a behind the scenes insight into this huge and ambitious project.