This editorial on text based street art was originally published in my street art newsletter, Beyond the Walls, which lands in inboxes on the 1st of every month with reflections and unexpected finds. This excerpt is from the May 1st, 2026, edition. Subscribe here to receive future issues.
On my last day at Nuart Aberdeen, I joined a tour led by walking artist Alisa Oleva, where one of the exercises was to write down every word we encountered in the streets. As we moved through the city, it quickly became clear that, aside from a handful of tags and a couple of poems by festival artist V2K, most of what we were reading was either telling us what to do or what not to do, or trying to sell us something.
What I noticed that day reflects something broader: rarely do words in public space invite us to think about ourselves, or to engage with a place in a way that feels genuinely our own. The same dynamic extends to the other space we all inhabit, the digital one, where language is largely shaped by news and advertising, addressing us as demographics, as voters, or as customers, often with a clear agenda, if not outright propaganda.
In both cases, there is little room for language that speaks to more personal, less instrumental dimensions of experience. What we encounter instead is language designed to direct, or to sell, rarely to connect with us in a way that feels personal or lasting.
Saying shocking, offensive things may make headlines, but I believe we need more billboards and big signs that express love, kindness, and welcome.
Robert Montgomery
Poetry carries a certain opacity, a gap in meaning that resists full understanding, and it is within that gap that something else can take shape, a space for interpretation, for projection, for thought.
It is within that space that the artists of this year’s Nuart Aberdeen street art festival began to move, each responding to the theme in a different way. Some approached it directly through poetry, working with language in its most immediate form, while others explored it more broadly, engaging with the tension between text and image.
This is something I had already touched on in an article I wrote before the festival, where I argued for a shift in focus from image to language, looking at text-based street art as a response to the growing dominance of large-scale figurative murals, works that are often technically impressive and visually pleasing, yet sometimes conceptually limited, and increasingly closer to billboard advertising than to something that invites reflection.
What interested me was the possibility of reshaping the relationship between the work and its audience. You are not observing it from below, you are reading it, and reading implies a different kind of involvement. I was drawn to a form of writing in the streets that could disrupt expectations shaped by cities accustomed to being visually enhanced, where art is expected to beautify and anything that interrupts that expectation risks feeling out of place.
Looking back at this edition, though, it became clear that text does not simply replace the image. In many cases, it generates one. Through the way letters are drawn, shaped, and distributed in space, language itself begins to operate visually, producing images in the mind as much as on the wall.
After all, this entire culture begins with writing, with kids reshaping the alphabet on trains and walls, stretching letters beyond their basic forms, sometimes to the point of abstraction. One of the artists at this year’s festival, Remi Rough, is there precisely as a reminder of that trajectory, his practice moving from letters to style, into abstraction, while retaining something inherently poetic, a sense of rhythm that runs through his compositions, which he himself describes as “visual haikus.”
His work traces the path from letters to image, while the festival moves in the opposite direction, from image back to language. Things, when pushed far enough, turn into their opposite.
And so what I had initially imagined as a shift now feels more like a loop, where text and image fold into each other, each carrying traces of the other rather than standing in opposition.
After seeing how the concept unfolded in the streets, it became clear that the idea of poetry taking over the city is not only about rebalancing the dominance of large-scale figurative murals. It is also a way of freeing poetry from its usual contexts, bringing it back into daily life, allowing people to encounter it again without mediation.
During the Nuart Plus programme, festival artist Ed Hicks gave a talk that began with a quote by Philip K. Dick: “The symbols of the divine initially show up at the trash stratum.” In VALIS (1981), the “trash stratum” refers to the overlooked layer of reality, where meaning emerges from what is usually ignored.
In Aberdeen, I found myself thinking about that idea in reverse, poetry moving out of its more protected contexts and into the public space we all inhabit. One afternoon, while documenting The Writing is on the Wall as he was “tattooing” the city with his poems, I saw an older woman stop, read one of the lines, take a moment, and then say to the artist, “you really touched my heart with that.” And the sentence sat there, right next to a seagull’s mess on the wall. Symbols of the divine showing up at the trash stratum, indeed.
(and photo evidence that my writing is authentic 😅)
What I witnessed felt less like emergence and more like a redistribution: when poetry, or even a moment of disruption like Dr.D’s altered road signs, enters the streets, it can do something, however small, for someone.
In that sense, this movement echoes the early gestures of street art itself, when images were taken out of institutional spaces and placed directly in the urban landscape.
It is no coincidence that artists working in this context, those who offer their art to the public without guarantees or expectations of return (“even after all this time, the sun never says to the earth: you owe me”), are the ones who carry that gesture forward.
