Image Credit: Photo of Jon Link, photographed by Ellen Kydd for Modern Toss.

Jon Link has spent his career finding value in the stuff polite culture tends to overlook. Starting out in graphic design, record sleeves and magazines, he eventually put those skills to work for himself, co-founding Modern Toss with Mick Bunnage and turning angry commuter sketches into a gloriously unruly universe of cartoons, books, animation, television, sculpture and interactive art.

Twenty-one years on, the philosophy remains refreshingly intact: make what makes you laugh, protect the weird idea, and don’t be too quick to tidy up the mess. Modern Toss might deal in swearing, irritation and everyday human stupidity, but there’s something quietly democratic underneath it all – preserving the language, characters and experiences that rarely make it into respectable cultural archives.

That spirit runs riot through Having an exhibition, yeah? 21 years of Modern Toss, at Drawing Room in Bermondsey until 6 September, complete with the UK Swear Map, interactive machines and 103 metres of F***yeux Tapestry.

Our suggestion? Go see it. Then support something independently made, learn how something gets printed, protect your local oddity – or record a regional swearword before the robots flatten everything out.

You’ve had a long career across graphic design, magazines, publishing, television, animation and exhibitions, but Modern Toss began with angry drawings made on the daily commute. Looking back, what did you learn in those early years about making your own opportunities that you’d want a young creative starting out today to know?

Learn something useful, like how things get made or printed and how to do it. Then when you’ve had enough of doing it for someone else, which you will, use all that to make something for yourself. That’s sort of what we did. Although this was before the dawn of the robots, which might make things tricky, I’ve always thought stone masonry is worth looking into.

Image Credit: Artwork for ‘Having an exhibition, yeah? 21 years of Modern Toss’ at Drawing Room.

Modern Toss has always found humour in the everyday irritations of British life. After 21 years of watching us behave badly, what do you think has changed most about Britain – and what stubbornly hasn’t?

The biggest change is the pipes that it all gets delivered through. Twenty years ago people were rude to each other directly, on the bus, over a fence, at the photocopier. Now most of it’s been rerouted through a screen with little winking cartoon emojis added in. What hasn’t changed is the actual annoyance underneath. Bins, parking, someone eating crisps on a train, all still there. You’ve got a different delivery system running all the same old shit though it.

Image Credit: Photo from the exhibition, ‘Having an exhibition, yeah? 21 years of Modern Toss’ at Drawing Room.

The new UK Swear Map is funny, but it’s also documenting regional language at a time when dialects are fading and AI can struggle with accents and non-standard English. When did you realise this wild idea might actually be preserving something culturally important?

Honestly, not until we did the Mersey Addendum (an add-on to the Swear Table just for Liverpool). That was the first time I realised how many regional words there were that I’d never heard of. Not variations on words I knew, completely separate vocabulary, operating in its own world, sealed off from the main body of the national language. And if that’s true of one city, it’s true everywhere. You don’t set out thinking you’re preserving anything but it might be a bi-product of what we end up making.

Image Credit: Photo from the exhibition, ‘Having an exhibition, yeah? 21 years of Modern Toss’ at Drawing Room.

There’s something beautifully grounded about this exhibition – regional voices, crude drawings, machines you physically operate, the Portrait Booth, a 103-metre tapestry made with hundreds of people. In an increasingly automated and algorithmic culture, do you feel more protective of the messy, analogue, imperfect side of creativity?

Yes, but I’d put it a bit differently. We actually control a lot of our work. Cartoons are little worlds where everyone does what you tell them to do. So sometimes it’s nice to do the exact opposite, work with groups of people where you’ve got no idea what’s coming out the other end. For the Swear Map I did several swear appeals on Instagram to get the voices sorted. A few guidelines, then several evenings of strangers sending me voice messages of themselves swearing. Pretty much all of them were brilliant. Yeah, keep the mess, live with the shit.

Image Credit: Photo from the exhibition, ‘Having an exhibition, yeah? 21 years of Modern Toss’ at Drawing Room.

Modern Toss has spent years crashing high culture into low culture – the Periodic Table becomes the Periodic Table of Swearing, the Bayeux Tapestry becomes the F***yeux Tapestry, academic linguistic research becomes a swear census. Is taking the piss out of seriousness part of the point, or do you secretly take all of this extremely seriously?

I think we just really enjoy putting low end data into high end information systems, It also speaks about how all the stuff down the bottom end gets lost or forgotten, and that’s clearly not fair is it? So part of our work is to make sure things that often get overlooked are preserved forever in high end information systems.

Image Credit: Photo from the exhibition, ‘Having an exhibition, yeah? 21 years of Modern Toss’ at Drawing Room.

You came up through a creative world of magazines, record sleeves, independent publishing and early internet culture. Do you think today’s creative industries still leave enough room for weird ideas that don’t immediately make commercial or algorithmic sense?

It’s never easy making weird stuff that no one asked for, but it never was. What’s interesting about it is it takes you somewhere you couldn’t have planned. The Swear Map is like this, it started off as a regional idea and then a national idea with an appeal for swearwords, then with a university dialect study attached and coverage in the New York Times. You have to start somewhere weird and see where it takes you, because the weird starting point is the unique part and also the only bit you control.

Modern Toss has survived for more than two decades without becoming noticeably more respectable. What have you learned about protecting a distinctive voice as audiences, platforms, commissioners and ideas about what is acceptable keep changing?

It’s a self-contained world with its own internal rules, and everything that comes into it has to work, otherwise it’s not part of it, is it? We just do what makes us laugh. We’ve never really chased commissions, but sometimes there’s a lucky accident where what we do lines up with what someone wants, and then you get a TV series or a tapestry out of it.

Image Credit: Photo from the exhibition, ‘Having an exhibition, yeah? 21 years of Modern Toss’ at Drawing Room.

Finally, give us three cultural places in London that mean something to you – galleries, pubs, cinemas, shops, venues, odd corners, anything goes. Where would you send a Run Riot reader, and why?

Dash The Henge, Camberwell: Our studio’s round the corner. Great records and live music, you can get a drink in the pub opposite and watch the madness unfold on a Friday night.

The Lord Clyde, Southwark: A jewel of a pub. Carpets, red velvet curtains, a piano. It does not get better than this.

The Stink Pole, Union Street/Southwark Bridge rd: An old green pole that used to let the smells out of the sewers. Needs protecting.

Find Jon at jonlink.com and everything else at moderntoss.com

Having an exhibition, yeah? 21 years of Modern Toss runs at Drawing Room, New Tannery Way, Bermondsey, London SE1 5WS, until 6 September. Tickets are on sale now via Drawing Room.