Packed with historic paintings, patched-up denim, and a love of all things heavy, Tom Cardwell’s work reimagines metal culture through an artistic lens. He talks to Amped about battle vests, black metal, and why the street is just as much a gallery as any museum…

Words & photos by Felix Bartlett (@bartlettfelix4) | July 21, 2025

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Aside from the scattered paintbrushes and a well-worn battle vest draped over the back of a studio chair, you wouldn’t guess that Tom Cardwell is quietly assembling a project that ties together centuries of art history with contemporary metal culture. His latest paintings are halfway finished; notes for a forthcoming book chapter are open on the desk. But for now, he’s taking a break from both, pausing to reflect on how he ended up here.

“I’m Tom Cardwell. I’m an artist and a researcher,” he says, straightforward and to the point. “My work is focused around visual cultures of metal, and particularly clothing and metal.”

It’s a neat way of summarising a sprawling practice, one that moves between canvas, academic writing, and scenes like London’s Battle Jackets event, where Cardwell recently swapped studio time for conversations with fans, collectors, and fellow makers. The connection between fine art and heavy metal might not be obvious at first glance, but for Cardwell, it’s long been a natural overlap.

His journey into this world didn’t begin with academic theory, but rather with painting. “I made paintings that come from a still life tradition, in a way, but putting that into a contemporary context,” he explains. One of those paintings, a jacket, rich in personal symbolism, eventually grew into something much larger. “From that I actually developed what became my PhD project, which was a PhD involving making paintings as well as a more kind of theoretical academic research.” Five years later, the project culminated in a book, Heavy Metal Armour, published in 2022. “It was a collection of paintings of battle vests and some academic writing about those, situating them historically but also in relation to fine art and art history and imagery, I suppose, in painting history.”

The book is less about one particular band and more about the collective ways metal fans recontextualise visual culture. Cardwell points to the example of black metal album covers, where romantic paintings are often lifted directly from historical works. “There’s a lot of use of romantic painting where those paintings are deliberately, so directly lifted and repurposed as album covers,” he says. In other cases, the references are more subtle but no less intentional. “One example would be Bolt Thrower’s Fourth Crusade, where they use the Delacroix painting and recontextualise that in the context of that album.”

For Cardwell, the creative question is what happens when you push this visual recycling even further. “What would it look like if you had a battle vest populated with patches based on historic paintings instead of directly album artwork?” he asks, describing his own experiments in mixing pre-modern art with contemporary metal imagery. The idea taps into a tradition from the 17th and 18th centuries, when wealthy collectors commissioned paintings of their art collections. “I was thinking about that, the jacket is that, really,” he says, imagining the vest as a miniature gallery of reinterpreted works.

That blending of the personal and the communal came to life most recently at the Battle Jackets London event at the Underworld in Camden, where Cardwell brought his books and paintings into a shared space of fans and creators. The connection came about informally, as these things often do. “I came to be involved in the Battle Jackets London event… through originally interviewing Louis, who runs Battle Jackets London, for my book,” he recalls. “I probably spoke to him, I think it was in lockdown. I remember doing a video call interview.”

That initial contact led to a casual meet-up at a gig shortly before the event. “I noticed through social media that he was doing this, and I said, ‘Oh, it looks really good, I’m going to come down.’ And he then got back in touch and said, ‘Oh, well, why don’t you bring some books and have a stand and come and talk about what you’re doing?’”

For Cardwell, events like this serve a specific purpose beyond selling books or showing paintings; they create opportunities for fans to move from private practices into public spaces. “With something like jacket making, which on one level is quite individualised… you might have friends that you share that with, but for other people, that might be quite a sort of personal thing that you do on your own,” he reflects. “But then if you go to gigs, you come into a shared space.”

The Battle Jackets event brought those dynamics together. “You had people sewing live in the event, you had lots of other people just having a look round,” he says. The centrepiece was a competition where attendees wore their vests and participated in a judging process, turning the act of customising a jacket into a moment of public celebration.

When asked about artists he’d love to collaborate with, Cardwell pauses for a moment before tracing a line through art history. “I’m particularly interested in things where there is a chain of references that go back,” he says. One example from his own experience is a collaboration with a German patch maker, Nils from Iron & Ash Patches. “We realised through a sort of back-and-forth email discussion that we both had an interest in the kind of painting history side of things. So we talked about doing patches that come from that.”

For historical inspirations, he mentions familiar names in the metal-adjacent art canon. “Gustav Doré, who did lots of illustrations famously for Milton’s Paradise Lost, which gets reused a lot,” he says. Another is John Martin, known for his dramatic heaven-and-hell landscapes, and then there’s Albrecht Dürer. “ This was something Nils and I discussed together in relation to the artwork for Stormkeep’s ‘Galdrum’ album, which features an Ian Miller artwork that is heavily influenced by Dürer’s ‘The Knight, Death and the Devil”

Looking ahead, Cardwell is already immersed in new projects. “I’m currently working on a book chapter that’s going to come out in a compilation by different authors about different aspects of metal culture,” he says. His chapter focuses on the reappropriation of black metal imagery in clothing, pushing the conversation into new terrain. Alongside that, he continues his series of paintings exploring how historical images are repurposed not just on jackets, but in everyday urban life, through stickers, signs, and the kinds of ephemeral visuals that line city streets.

Some of that work recently appeared in Helsinki, where Cardwell exhibited large banners in public spaces as part of a festival. “The paintings that inform the banners were themselves a reference to the kind of stuff I’d seen in the streets of Helsinki when I was living there,” he says, describing the project as a loop of influences that goes from the gallery to the street and back again.

For Cardwell, that full-circle dynamic seems to be the point. Whether it’s a battle vest, a historic painting, or a banner hung in a public square, the same question underpins his work: how do images evolve when they move between hands, between cultures, and across time?

Keep up to date with Tom and his work through his website here: https://tomcardwell.uk