This artwork appeared in June 2011 in Camden, north London, on Jeffrey Street. It is a direct reference from Banksy to someone from within his own community, and it rewards a close look at the details.

On the wall is a small child. Over the eyes runs a thick black bar cutting straight across the face. This bar is not a random design choice. It is the classic device used in the press or in police records to hide someone’s identity by censoring the face. So from the very first glance, the child is presented as someone who has been dealt with by the system.

In the child’s hand is a round bubble wand, the kind children use to blow soap bubbles. Inside the bubble coming out of the wand is a single word: TOX. This detail matters, because the word does not come out of the child’s mouth. The child blows it. So this is not a signature, a slogan or a shout. It is something fragile, coming out of a toy, hanging in the air for a moment before it pops.

Tox, real name Daniel Halpin, was a graffiti writer who had left his tag across the London Underground and various parts of the city for years. In June 2011, the very month this mural appeared, he was convicted in the case brought against him and sentenced to twenty seven months in prison. A statement used by the prosecution at the trial was widely quoted in the press: that Halpin was “not Banksy”, that he lacked artistic skill, and was therefore just trying to stamp his tag in as many places as possible.

Banksy’s wall answers that statement directly. But the exact nature of the answer is deliberately left unclear. On one reading, this is a gesture of solidarity: a signature that a court ruled was not art becomes art in Banksy’s hands, undoing the prosecution’s distinction. On another reading, it is a show of superiority: the tag Tox spent years building becomes, in Banksy’s hands, as light as a bubble blown by a child’s toy.

The black bar over the eyes deepens this ambiguity further. It both protects the child, hiding his identity, and marks him as guilty. The bubble works the same way, both a fragile beauty and a nothing.

This piece is one of Banksy’s most indirect comments on his own position. In court, the name Banksy was used as a yardstick to draw the line between art and vandalism. Banksy went up on a wall and, with a single bubble, reminded everyone how arbitrary that yardstick really is.