Silent Bill: “I started making art a few years ago. Low-brow art with a political/social twist. One day I made up the society’s logo and wrote on it “coming soon”. Immediately I noticed that people were intrigued by it, so I took the next step and made an application form. People had to fill it out in order to “join the society” and post it back to the Tate Museum. I did it as a joke; I wasn’t expecting anything out of it, but a big laugh. However, people did start filling it. I was getting some really good application forms, which were works of art themselves: drawn, engraved… one guy even screen-printed it on a glass!”
Category:
Street Art
After a cozy weekend with my big, fat, Italo-French family, it was time to hit the city and explore the street art of Paris. I opted for the 13th district, where some great murals have just been added to an already outstanding collection of public art to inaugurate the open-air street art museum “Boulevard Paris 13”, a project curated by Itinerrance gallery.
At Nuart Aberdeen last year, I had the pleasure to help Carrie Reichardt mash hundreds of tiles into smaller pieces that—like the colours in a kaleidoscope made of life’s shards—would eventually tell two powerful stories on the walls of the Granite City. This year, after her talk had kicked off the Nuart Plus conferences programme, we sat down for a quick chat…
I met Helen a couple of years ago inside an abandoned factory in Germany. After several festivals, we recently caught up in Aberdeen. She told me about the murals she painted for Nuart, and shared insights into the path that brought her there.
I met Jon on a boat. We sailed the Stavanger Bay together during Nuart 2017. Our sail was dressed with an eye chart like the one used by optometrists. Artist Igor Ponosov meant for it to symbolize the distance between public art and its audience; a gap that Jon Reid is definitely working hard to close with his cultural blog “Dancing in the Dark – Creativity & Culture in Aberdeen and Beyond”
I met CeePil last summer in Bristol, where he was painting the back of the legendary Tap and Barrel Pub for Upfest 2018 alongside Smok and ShitOne. When I knew I was going to travel to Ghent, I asked him to meet for an interview and he invited me over to DOK, an amazing factory-turned-cultural-center where we sat for a cup of coffee…