Black Balloon

Black Balloon, the underground concept club created by artists Malcolm Pate and Mika Doll, grew into an alternative avant-garde dark-electro post-punk monthly pop up night at PUNK in Soho, London. It became known for a fashion-forward crowd, a high-contrast goth-glam attitude and a scene that treated nightlife as a living art form rather than entertainment. The club developed a cult following for its mix of music, fashion and image-making, all stitched together into one visual experience.


I worked with Malcolm and Mika as the club’s visual artist and photographer, creating a unique portrait artwork to announce each event. These images were built from photography I shot around London with club kids, styled and captured as bold, graphic, minimalist portraits. Through compositing and hand retouching, I created a limited-edition set of artworks that became the visual identity and mythology of Black Balloon across print, flyers and digital promotion.


I created the promotional artwork from concept to final image, designed the direction, typography and layout seen on the flyers and posters and worked with Malcolm and Mika to keep the entire aesthetic sharp, dark, playful and unmistakably tied to the world of Black Balloon.


One of the centrepieces of the night was the live BRINDLE Booth hour. This wasn’t a normal club booth. It was a small pop-up editorial set right inside the chaos of the night, where clubbers stepped into the lights wearing their own creations and became part of a new collaborative artwork. I conceived, directed and photographed the live session, turning the dance floor into an open studio where the crowd and I shaped the images together in real time. Collaborative creative chaos.






Alongside the portraits, I photographed the pulse of the night itself under my club photography project megamegamega. I moved through the crowd with the music, catching the flashpoints of energy, the sweat, the styling, the fashion experiments and the characters who gave the night its electricity. These images formed a parallel archive of the club’s raw atmosphere and the people who kept it alive.


Black Balloon caught attention outside the underground, appearing in Time Out London as one of the most unusual and visually led nights in the city, celebrated for its collision of fashion, performance, photography and late-night creativity.



Black Balloon existed in the moment, built by the people who dressed for it, danced in it and became the art inside it.