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Sweet Toof

There was always going to be a successor to rival the aftermath of Banksy, but did you ever imagine you’d recognize his signature spray through pink gums and cartoon white teeth? The answer is “No, SUPERSWEET. I didn’t”. Though while you procrastinate having ever viewed one of these open-mouthed articles, we’ll cut in and compare him with the grand maestro himself.

Bad Guts, 2008

Like Banksy, the enigmatic artist has stuck out some cold nights in a prison cell, ergo preferring to keep his identity schtum. He gets up to good ol’ fashioned after-dark street spraying and happens to hold a prestigious degree in fine art from the Royal Academy of Arts.

And through it all his street cred has remained perfunctorily intact as he regularly collaborates with Cyclops, TEK33, and Cept148 (if you didn’t already know them.) He also goes under an alias – Sweet Toof – a reference to his gummy art, in turn a childhood reference to those candied teeth we all bought from the tuck shop for a penny a time.
Sweet Toof obviously liked chewing on them enough to invest his 50p lunch money on spray cans, inducting him into the beginnings of the graffiti art world he’d come to vandalize; apparently it was that early mix of spontaneity and excitement that got him hooked.

Cyclops is one of his most successful partnerships. The dastardly duo fill up on lager and bagels before hitting the East End. The morbid pair met when a mutual friend died of an overdose. Their instinctual pieces are made from pure adrenaline and a common goal to create, as Cyclops notes; ‘It’s like a job really; under pain of death’ as they ‘have to paint these fucking monstrosities.’

Sickboy / Cyclops, 2007

Reading ‘Style Wars’ by Henry Chalfant first inspired him to whip up some letterforms before gradually getting into cut -outs and paste-ups. He then conjured up his simple childhood iconic image of the gummy teeth, though it isn’t only nostalgia he aims for. For him, teeth can be sexy or aggressive. They’re also constant reminders of death; “It is how we get identified by police when there’s nothing else left. It sounds morbid but it’s what we all come down to.”

His most recent show at the Sartorial Art Gallery was filled with figures adorned in Elizabethan ruffs and prison jumpsuits. He has also been linked to the concurrent exhibition ‘Fools Gold’ by Martin Leas Brown, although he adherently denies this alias.

Whoever this thirty-something year old is, he is determined to stay in the shades of the night, cloaked under the allusive guise of ‘Sweet Toof’ like a deviant batman, stocked up on spray cans, paint, adrenalin and an expensive looking website of course.

If you see any of Sweet Toof’s creations about London, be sure to send them in to This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it with "Toof" in the subject field. We’ll publish the best in Uber Street.

Words: Tanya Geddes