It was a with great pleasure i accepted an invite from my old friend Martyn Reid to participate in the Nuart festival in Stavanger Norway (They also do a Nuart Aberdeen ). I worked on this festival for over a decade being first invited as an exhibiting artist (when it was more of a New Media festival in 2004) and coming back year after year in a progression of roles from curator to artist and production manager. The year after we met Nuart started to focus on street art, the budget was small and the possibilities of painting round the city were non existent. We ended up painting some abandoned buildings in a down at heel part of town as well as staging a small show up at the arts centre Tou Scene in 2005.
Since then the Festival has grown, huge murals appeared around the town, logistics grew, cherry pickers were hired with a huge volunteer task force who’s amazing help allowed the thing to grow into a world leading festival of art on the street, drawing camera crews from CNN from the USA, Google it. With amazing artist line ups from across the globe, the curation of each years participants tells you a lot about the way street art has developed over the years, covering most aspects of public space art intervention. From situationalists to muralists, wheat paste to spray paint, key artists from the history of the medium as well as show casing the breadth of the techniques happening on the street today.
I did a decade of production and have visited them a few times as an artist over the years, so it with great pleasure to be invited back for this years ‘Intangible’ festival. A back to basics approach to urban mark making. A what you can carry method of production on un sanctioned spaces. Not a mural in sight. I have always been a fan of floor based works that you come across when walking round a town. It all seemed to start with that for me. Over the years people have worked out logistics for larger and larger works. Rollers on poles, fire extinguisher and extendable ladders, anything you could carry on public transport and then over fences but it rarely involved a cherry picker or a scissor lift.
For 5 days i wandered the city with a hi-viz popping up life size works, i used a ladder once… it was lovely. I have a good knowledge of the city built on my years of production of the festival which meant i had a good idea of places i wanted to paint and images i wanted to drop there. What a wonderful week thank you Stavanger, a sea of thumbs ups, Coffee and cake, even two six packs and a packet of fags! Most importantly i didn’t get chased once.
A couple of things didn’t fit the walls chosen, and were painted over, sorry for that. But i think that much of it will stay and brings a certain something to the places chosen, but like all street art it’s councils and maintenance contracts that are the curators of our public space.
