BUILDHOLLYWOOD Scotland had the pleasure of inviting Wood to present her work on some of our sites across Edinburgh and Glasgow for our ongoing Your Space Or Mine series. Harking back to the signed celebrity postcards of old Hollywood, the artwork, which was presented across 48 sheets, 16 sheets and 4 sheet takeovers across the cities, played with ideas around the idolation and artifice of fame.

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As part of BUILDHOLLYWOOD’s Your Space Or Mine series, Ioannou’s cinematic style painted the streets of Edinburgh with an otherworldly brush, celebrating carefully curated moments with the community she loves. Showcased across Edinburgh’s historical streets, including Leith Walk, the billboards featured epic scenes from Ioannou’s mind that live beyond realism, evoking a fun narrative.

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Gaurab Thakali’s artworks are the product of the rich inner landscape of his imagination, hued with the vibrant colours of Kathmandu, populated and soundtracked by the musicians he’s most deeply inspired by, and informed by his encounters with a series of alluring subcultures. His distinctive work has appeared in prestigious publications such as The New York Times and The New Yorker, and his illustrations have also adorned clothing, skateboards, beer cans, record sleeves, and turntables. Defined by their saturated colours and gradients delineated by bold line work, his work moves between psychedelic landscapes, city life, and snow-topped mountain ranges, incorporating mystical elements with features of the everyday, while nature – at its most abundant and riotous – is ubiquitous.

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Observing local talent on a month-by-month basis with works that captured the spirit and beauty of Black joy through art and photography, it brought the project’s sentiment of evoking warmth and brightness to each city, in one of the darkest and coldest times of the year. For Celebrating Joy’s final stop-off in Sheffield, we worked with HOME to display work by a trio of incredible artists from the city on its own streets.

Anisa Nuh-Ali is a multi-disciplinary artist, researcher and documenter, who contributed two beautiful pieces – a photograph of her mother, and one of and Ilhan, a community organiser – captured during a Baraanbur workshop at one of their local community centres. Mixed media artist PattyB, who explores her heritage and Black womanhood through her work, shared the stunning, serene La Vie En Rose 2.

And finally, artist Kedisha Coakley’s Negritude No.8, 2017-2020, developed from manipulated and collagraph-printed synthetic hair, brought vibrance and luminous colour to the street. Each image was able to bring measurable joy to anyone who perceived it, exactly as the project had rightfully intended.

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From the start of her career to now, Ronan Mckenzie has quickly established herself as one of London’s most authentic and multifaceted creatives. Born and raised in Walthamstow, East London, her rise to success saw Mckenzie progress from a beaming young artist participating in an art foundation and internship at I-D magazine to a highly skilled creative with a plethora of titles under her job description.

Developing on her background in styling, lockdown saw Mckenzie delve into the design world after a newfound interest in sewing pushed her to launch her own brand Selasi. But her versatility did not stop there, last year also saw Mckenzie launch HOME – a black-owned multifunctional creative space in North London that features an art gallery, community events space and creative workspace for members of the community to enjoy. “HOME responds directly to the personal and communal need for a more honest and representative space, that cares deeply for the artists we present and the community of people that we welcome into our space,” she told us, speaking on what pushed her to launch the project.

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Adam Jones’ spiritual home is the traditional boozer. Finding the decor of these British institutions endlessly inspiring, he tells us, “When you’ve got an eye for fashion, you can’t help but notice the wood against the green pool table on top of those red, brown, orange sun-bleached carpets. It’s a lot of colour and texture for the mind. You could just sit down there and make the entire collection out of that room.”

The 30-year-old fashion designer with an eye for kitsch has made a name for himself by repurposing original beer towels and turning them into a range of (which have recently been spotted on the likes of Dua Lipa, Nothing But Thieves, and Sports Team). He even used a pub – where he had a bar job at the time – as a venue to show his first collection during London Fashion Week 2015.

In the wake of launching his latest collection, Jones is the most recent emerging designer in our ongoing Your Space Or Mine project. Shot by photographer Luke Million, this series of billboards feature Jones’ newest sartorial creations presented alongside classic archive pieces and photographed on location in a South London former-Job Centre-turned-bar – a time capsule of peak-1970s decor.

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“What’s that man doing lying down there dad?” So piped up a young lad on seeing Ben Wilson sprawled across the ribbed metal floor of London’s Millennium Footbridge. Despite the fact that Wilson was wielding a tiny brush and surrounded by pots of acrylic enamel paint the kid could be forgiven for asking the question because the work itself was so small you had to get on your hands and knees to focus on the teeny-weeny figure! “Good on yer Ben. You’re a star. Your stuff’s better than half of what they’ve got going on over there,” bugled another enthusiastic passerby waving her arm breezily towards Tate Modern.

Suffice to say that Wilson’s trademark paintings on splats of disregarded gum are true crowd pleasers. He can spend hours on a single work. The paintings range in styles. There are black and white calligraphic designs with whirling lines and forms that reveal worlds within worlds. Sometimes he’ll opt for a meticulous painterly representation of people and places that he can see from the site where the gum is found. On other occasions he creates fabulous tiny abstract designs that incorporate dedications to folk, texts painted seemingly with a single brush hair that celebrate or commemorate persons, places or events dear to Wilson or are suggested by people who happen across him at work.

Asked what artists he likes Wilson rattles off various names that suggest the range of his own creative past, “Oh, Jackson Pollock, Andy Goldsworthy, Dave Nash, Andy Warhol, Stik, outsider artists…” Wilson has previously built beautifully crafted wooden sculptures and environments, painted billboards, created assemblages out of litter found in the streets, filled numerous sketchbooks with observational drawing, made ceramic tiles, established trails above the arctic circle and elsewhere across the world. He added, “And the painter printmaker Peter Green was very supportive when I was younger. I like all artists. What’s really most important to me is the immensity of human creativity.”

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While the last month finally saw the grand return to art galleries and creative spaces, the process of going and enjoying an exhibition is still not quite as accessible as it once was – with the backlog of exhibitions creating an extremely long waitlist for tickets. However, thankfully for art lovers all over London, curator Tanaka Saburi has collaborated with BUILDHOLLYWOOD for the second year in a row to bring an exhibition to the most accessible location of them all, the streets.

If there’s one thing, in particular, that is clear when talking to Tanaka Saburi is his naturally determined and hardworking demeanour. Born to a Zimbabwean family and raised in Birmingham, he attended Keele University to complete his undergraduate degree in Law and Liberal Arts. With the initial intention of becoming a painter, Saburi’s interest in curation was birthed when he moved to London in 2017 to work on Savile Row. Since, Saburi has occupied important roles at Paul Smith, Joseph and Richard James (where he currently works through the week). Extending beyond tailoring, his responsibilities have included working on merchandising and PR. “I used to go to all the northern cities and show them how to display Paul Smith suiting in certain ways, how to show it off and understand the mix between art and fashion for him in his context,” he explained.

Launched last year, during the height of the pandemic alongside designer Nina Kunzendorf, The Molasses Gallery is a space to promote the work of young artists of colour. The first iteration of the collaboration with Your Space or Mine featured 12 artists, with a theme inspired by the 1975 poem “To a Black Artist” by Gordon Parks. This time around the exhibition entitled ‘commodities’ focuses on the relationship young up-and-coming artists of colour have with the concept of value and commercial success.

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Sports Banger is a true from-below phenomenon, punching up and talking back to authority. Born from the tradition of anti-establishment DIY culture, the acclaimed clothing brand is making an art form of conspicuous, unapologetic bootlegging. Founded in 2013 by Jonny Banger – an artist working across fashion, activism, culture and curation, music, publishing and so much more – Sports Banger channels the frustrations, passions, dreads, and hopes of a generation. Always focused on community, Jonny explains, “Sports Banger is a celebration of people, our relationships with each other, and the outside world. We know lots of people from all different worlds and we like to bring everyone together. Everyone we work with, there’s a personal relationship there somewhere. The most important thing is art and fun.”

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To coincide with Record Store Day on June 12^th, BUILDHOLLYWOOD will unveil its one-of-a-kind street gallery with billboard images from legendary photographers Mick Rock and Pogus Caesar displayed alongside those from up-and-coming photographers Denisha Anderson and Steven M. Wiggins in London, Birmingham, Brighton, Bristol, Cardiff and Edinburgh.

The project will see iconic photographs of renowned musicians including Jay-Z, Madonna, Grace Jones, Dizzie Rascal, Debbie Harry and Stevie Wonder appear alongside emerging talents like Wu-Lu, Scrufizzer, Sketch and Oscar Jerome. Displayed in cities throughout the UK, the striking images bring bold music photography into the heart of the community – and onto the very streets which inspired many of the musicians who are featured.

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“I started Conversations From Calais after volunteering there for several organisations and every time I came back to London, I felt the need to share what I saw, heard and experienced. I felt so angry about how displaced communities were being portrayed in the media, especially when arriving in the UK from Northern France. I wanted to find a way to break away from this by remembering, documenting and commemorating all the different conversations I’d had with displaced people I’d met there. I thought this would be the simplest, rawest and most powerful way to share my experience. And slowly the project grew from there.”

The ‘refugee jungle’ in Calais may have been razed to the ground by French authorities in 2016 but there’s still a constant stream of displaced people stranded in the port city, anxiously seeking ways to reach the UK and apply for asylum.

Conversations From Calais bears witness to the multiple challenges facing these refugees and migrants. By recounting and sharing their chats with volunteers so many hitherto invisible, silent voices are recovered. “This ever-growing collection of conversations focuses on capturing the diversity of experiences and avoids creating new stereotypes of refugees as villains, heroic figures or hopeless victims.”

You noticed my cracked hands from the cold as we were having tea together. You insisted on  giving me some hand cream and told me to take care of my hands. I will never forget the kindness and warmth you showed me in that moment, even after all the hostility you had experienced from the world.

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“Art for me has been about expressing emotions I can’t explain another way. These paintings highlight my issues with barriers and hidden anxiety and mental health.”

As part of our ongoing Your Space Or Mine initiative to provide a platform for creatives on the street, we showcase a series of 14 vibrant paintings, on 7 billboards across Bristol, forming an outdoor gallery and trail to be enjoyed in a safe and accessible way by the local community. Jeff is “Hoping that these paintings bring colour and the light of hope to the viewer. I hope they encourage people who are down to look up!”

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Talking with King Owusu, we return continually to the idea of community. It’s the recurring element that influences, motivates, and facilitates his work as an artist and illustrator. Often drawn in marker pen, his colourful, narrative-led artworks are anchored in a fundamental desire to share some simple truths about humanity, community, and inclusivity, and to enlarge our empathy. He tells us, “One aspect of my work that is really important to me is its accessibility and telling stories that highlight and capture the black experience.”

Not only is his art highly influenced by his roots as the child of Ghanaian parents, it’s also informed by a spirit of generosity. His work is born from and of the communities that raised him, and he’s driven by a desire to give something back. Reflecting on his childhood as the youngest of seven, Owusu recalls, “At home, I was like a little fly on the wall just listening and taking in all the creativity that was being conjured up.” He remembers being particularly inspired by an art project his brother initiated in the local community. “He made all these really beautiful, detailed portrait paintings documenting the people growing up on our estate at the time,” he says, “Such a kind and simple concept.”

London itself is integral to Owusu’s practice, exposing him firsthand to a kind of visceral collaboration-in-action – the exciting moments where cultures collide and witnessing how these encounters can generate something new and dynamic. Growing up in Wood Green in North London, he was surrounded by a vibrant West African community alongside the wider multicultural influences the capital had to offer. “In London, we are blessed to have so many diverse people from all over the world that help build and shape our communities,” he tells us. “I have really appreciated and enjoyed the diversity not just in culture but also in ideas and ambitions.”

Whilst studying design at CSM, Owusu met South London photographer and filmmaker Campbell Addy, who signed him up on sight to his diversity-first agency, Nii. As a model, Owusu has been featured in Love magazine, Dazed & Confused, and Farfetch. Considering the exciting and inextricable relationship between fashion and art, he says, “Fashion also creates the opportunity for art to be made into textiles and for print to be worn. I think about the t-shirts Keith Haring made which made his work more affordable and accessible to a wider audience.”

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Drawing on a unique and stylish lexicon of cinematic references, his distinctive photographs often evoke the high-key colour of a Californian dreamscape. With its irresistible golden light, and that uncanny experience of boulevards and vistas you’ve encountered a thousand times before, as if in a dream or immortalised on the silver screen, California seems like the perfect home for Krug’s saturated, otherworldly images.

While influenced by the enduring aesthetic of the 1960s exploitation movies which he devoured as a youth, Krug’s vision seems to depict a world disorientingly dislocated from time. Like so many others prepared to make their home on a fault-line for the promise of eternal summer, the Kansas-born photographer was drawn to the Pacific Coast by the elusive, shimmering mirage of bygone California. “It’s something that doesn’t exist anymore,” he explains. “But it’s a place in our minds, and it’s present in the works I’ve made over the years.”

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The concept of gathering stories from past and present global histories comes naturally to Ahluwalia, who grew up a kid of the diaspora with Indian and Nigerian heritage. As a native southwest Londoner she remembers being surrounded by hubs of migrant communities in the 90s, going to Tooting to get her hair done and travelling up to Southall with her family to go to the butchers.

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“The last three years have seen fundamental changes to how we relate to one another as individuals and as a society. Britain has exited from the European Union; the pandemic has bought new geographies to our daily lives; Black Lives Matter has voiced powerful articulations of systemic inequality. Division/Revision is a reflection on how relations are being re-defined through seismic shifts in the current social and political landscape.”

Uta Kögelsberger

 

With everything in such a state of flux it seems fitting that participating artists’ work will appear on sixteen billboards and change daily for sixteen consecutive days in London, Bristol, Birmingham, Manchester, Sheffield and Glasgow.

As you might expect the individual artworks are hugely diverse. From plain-speaking to intriguing, visually metaphoric to fantastical, playful to symbolic… Together they act as a fascinating, multi-perspectival intervention in the public realm that holds a mirror up to the turbulent and mutable times we are living through.

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Spanky the hand is front and centre, as he often has been throughout a rise that’s seen Super Freak turn a passion into a career, featuring on the pages of the New York and LA Times as well as working with brands like Vans, Levi’s and Dr Martens. Whitehouse’s signature character has been a key part of his ‘Superverse’ since his inception – in his own words, Spanky ‘is generally the happiest hand around but pretty clumsy so often finds himself in odd predicaments’. The pure cartoonish fun of a happy hand simply having a good time has its own effect, but Super Freak’s work isn’t pure fantasy. In fact there’s something oddly satisfying about the juxtaposition between Spanky’s chirpy demeanour and some of the more downbeat accompanying messaging when reality does occasionally seep in.

Here, though, our brilliantly malleable hero has definitely been caught on one of his good days and is a picture of carefree contentment.

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In ‘Lockdown A Self Portrait’ – the first of nine photographs on poster sites throughout Glasgow and Edinburgh: the latest iteration of BUILDHOLLYWOOD’s Your Space Or Mine artists’ street display project – we see five images of Nadeau variously posed in the same small corner of a cluttered room.

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Yinka’s large scale pieces work with pops of colour to transform public spaces like Thassaly Road Bridge and Dulwich Pavilion into eye-catching, inspiring works of art. Much of his work spreads words of positivity, like a recent commission by Harrow Council, for which Yinka took over an entire wall with a show-stopping rainbow mural reading “LOVE ALWAYS WINS”. His new billboards, which will be live for the month of February, are characteristically bright. Utilising his signature colours and unmistakable eye for design, Yinka chose the words “IF YOU CAN DREAM THEN ANYTHING IS POSSIBLE”. With pink, bold outlined type against a playful background of green, yellows, pinks, and blues, it’s an eye-catching reminder that we are always allowed to dream.

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One of the artist’s most recent creations is a 20ft high mural titled ‘Nous’ or ‘We’ (2020). It’s a striking, refulgent work made during a year that saw the BLM movement catapulting systemic racism to the fore of public consciousness, furthered the Brexit divide and witnessed an edge of the seat election in the US. Against a straw yellow disc Power’s painting features at its base a pair of crossed legs. This meditative pose dynamically morphs into two figures. They have one arm wrapped around each other’s shoulders. Their other hands are pressed palm to palm, overlapping and rendered in such a way as to mimic an anaglyph 3D effect. While our eyes bobble, the figures’ faces merge, their joined hands pulsing together, communicating ‘solidarity, unity and sisterhood’ as the artist intended.

As her ‘Play Me, I’m Yours’ 2017 painted piano work suggests – part of Luke Jerram’s international project to install pianos in public spaces for passersby to play – Power holds a special place in her heart for music and the performing arts. Nowadays that seems more important than ever. As she says, “For many of us, boogying on a sticky dance floor at a bar, gig or party seems like a distant dream. I want to give a shout-out to performers, musicians and those in the events industry who have faced a particularly challenging year.”

Power’s collaboration with BuildHollywood’s Your Space Or Mine street display project will showcase a new work featuring a splashy trio of colossal dancers. Appearing on poster sites both singly and together they finger click, writhe and high kick ecstatically against plant forms reminiscent of Matisse’s late cut-outs. But there’s a suggestion too that the figures are dancing underwater. Okay one’s wearing boots but hey! They’re getting down like their lives depended on it, throwing shapes and strutting their vitality even while submerged beneath a barely visible weight. So imagine how much more euphoric and spirited their dancing will become if they ever surfaced. Likewise, you can be sure the dancing will be wild and free when we finally emerge from the gloomy depths of this pandemic. In the meantime Bristol’s streets are in for another treat.

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Chance happenings in Archer’s daily life also spark ideas: a scribbled note or list that blows across her path in the park; a childhood rhyme or song lyric that returns unexpectedly to mind; the shit things that happen as well as the often-underappreciated everyday pleasures such as dogs, sunshine, bird song and boxes of Mr Kipling’s Cherry Bakewells.

Her cutesy imagery is often cut, however, with an altogether opposing sentiment. That is, the world is sick. Archer often combines delighting, toothsome motifs with hand-painted words that come from the pit of the stomach. Her painting of a lamb, pink bow for a collar with its shiny black hooves frolicking amidst tulips, hibiscus and violets coupled with the phrase ‘My Life Is Crap’ is one example. Then there’s the orange-eyed, pale lilac kitten on a pink ground, an imploring image with an imploring phrase rendered in sunny yellow to go with it, ‘Text Me Yeah?’ A special favourite is a chalky white blancmange with a pinky-red jelly topping set against a grey background. This wobbly dessert is top and tailed with the words ‘Thank God,’ and ‘I’m Normal.’ Archer’s work draws the viewer in through a delighting image and at the same time talks of human frailty and random cruelties, neediness, fear and self-delusion that visit all of us.

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At the heart of everything they do is an impassioned commitment to candour, transparency and inclusivity across society and in particular the creative industries. Their campaigning for better pay and conditions for everyone – including ancillary staff and support workers – is inspiring. Working for better access, fair treatment and art/community spaces that do more than pay lip service to social engagement is their clarion call.

For the Your Space Or Mine collaboration TWP wanted to address some of the systemic injustices and inequalities that prop up a rarefied, hierarchical model of art production and consumption. Their ‘ideas for a new art world’ comprise direct and ambitious suggestions as to how things might be improved for the many and not just the few. Posters and billboards bearing sparse black text on a series of brilliant colour backgrounds – ‘Shiny Self Care’ blue; ‘Luvd Island’ red and ‘Soft e-Boi Blush’ pinky-lilac, to mention a few – echoing the website ‘Pube Pallete’ (courtesy TWP’s fave designer Amad Ilyas). These grey-day-defying interventions confront passers-by with plain speaking ideas such as ‘old guard gatekeepers need to step aside for diverse leaders that frequently evolve – in art and everything else as well to be honest.

What’s special about TWP is they walk the walk. A visit to thewhitepube.co.uk evidences independent and tireless effort. In their own words, “We decided to start writing and state how art made us feel (happy, bored, angry, in love). We try to write in a way where we would fall through feelings and write about the art along the way (someone would later tell us this is like embodied criticism: body first encounters in the gallery).” Not content to produce numerous, entertaining, always thoughtful and very much felt texts they also support new writers by dishing out grants, champion creatives through offering their site homepage as a rolling platform and provide resources that level the playing field for emerging talents.

Gabrielle and Zarina hail from and currently reside in Liverpool and London respectively – Instagram is their ‘office’ – so over the coming weeks we’ll be sharing TWP’s mini-manifesto for a fairer art world, and a more just society on billboards and street sites in both cities.

Follow them on Instagram, check out their artist shout-outs and read or listen to the sometimes provocative, always attentive, probing and reflective texts via their website. Oh, did I mention they’re also down to earth and often very funny. Taking the world and work seriously doesn’t mean being po-faced. TWP are a breath of fresh air, just what we need to kick off 2021.

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It’s been a difficult year for everyone, but artists and students in particular have taken a huge hit to their ability to work. Our Your Space Or Mine project has taken on new importance for us this year, and for our latest collaboration, we teamed up with the University of Westminster to support their photography graduates by showcasing their work at two sites in Stepney Green and Dalston Junction.

As the students were unable to show off their hard work at an end of year show as they would in previous years, we wanted to offer an inspiring alternative, bringing their work to the eyes of an even bigger audience.

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Who convinced the Williams Fairey Brass Band to transcribe and perform a repertoire of acid house music?

Who persuaded ex-miners and police officers to work with members of an historical re-enactment society to recreate the bloody last stand of British coal production?

Who took the buckled, rusty carcass of a motor vehicle bombed in Baghdad on a road trip from New York City to Los Angeles?

Who collaboratively directed a film, narrated by a chameleon, featuring a Japanese dance hall queen called Bom Bom competing for glory in a dusty Jamaican car park?

Who marked the Battle of the Somme 2016 centenary by dispatching across the UK thousands of volunteers dressed in authentic WWI uniforms? When approached they didn’t speak but handed out cards with the name and rank of one of the 20,000 soldiers killed on just the first day of fighting.

Who adores bats, represented Britain in the Venice Biennale with images of tax haven Jersey ablaze, and thinks we should be worshiping lobsters and squid not eating them?

The art wizard Jeremy Deller, that’s who. A man who seems to produce more in a month than I’ve managed in a lifetime. When detective Lieutenant Columbo was asked what made the director John Cassavetes so special he said the man had a most fertile mind.

Ditto Deller. He is a ringmaster who delights his audience. And Deller’s audience isn’t just the art crowd but pretty much anyone with a pulse. He loves to both pose and prompt questions, to entertain, to provoke, to explore, to better understand and share a fierce curiosity and compassionate engagement with people and diverse cultures.

There are works that quietly seethe at injustice: the material banners commissioned on which, writ large, are callous texts sent to employees exploited by the gig economy. Others, like his bouncy castle replica of Stonehenge, at first seem a vehicle for sheer physical joy but along with the somersaults is a critique as to what’s considered heritage, what it’s for and who it belongs to.

Last year Deller made Everybody in the Place: An Incomplete History of Britain 1984 – 1992. In this film he talks to a group of young students about the origins and development of rave culture in the context of social and technological change, how the ad hoc parties in abandoned factories in Northern towns across the UK were – like Thatcher’s defeat of the miners – a ‘death ritual’ that marked a transition from an Industrial to a Service economy. The 1980s was a time of desperate uncertainty, a pivotal decade economically, socially and politically. It looks like we’re about to launch into another one. Hold on to your bucket hats.

Some of Deller’s earliest exhibited artworks were the posters he made advertising imagined exhibitions, apocryphal events that perhaps only he wanted to see at the time. He’s gone on to produce works on billboards and further forays in the primal medium of the poster.

In 2017 his ‘Strong and Stable My Arse’ work in response to Theresa May’s election campaign phrase caught the mood of the nation. Just before the first COVID– 19 restrictions Deller’s equally blunt ‘Tax Avoidance Kills’ posters sprung up across London. With design collaborator Fraser Muggeridge during lockdown they produced and sold thousands of ‘Thank God For Immigrants’ posters in aid of refugee support and action tackling food poverty.

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Earlier this year, we spotlighted Mark Titchner’s artwork PLEASE BELIEVE THESE DAYS WILL PASS in a series of bright posters which offered a rallying cry for hope and endurance across nation during the early days of the pandemic. With the UK back behind closed doors, we are collaborating with Mark once again to showcase 4 new inspiring artworks on our sites across the capital as we head into the grey winter months. It includes the messages HOPE REVEALS THE WORLD, THERE WILL BE A WAY, THE SUN RISES BRIGHT and THE FUTURE WILL BE BUILT FROM TODAY.

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‘Kid A’s panoramas of power were fuelled in part by 1990s news reports of war in former Yugoslavia; visuals for ‘OK Computer’ derived from imagining a nuclear winter, the aftermath of human devastation; abstract imagery for a ‘A Moon Shaped Pool’ evoke the unpredictability and power of the elements.

Likewise, the stark, graphic rendition of London deluged by floods for Thom Yorke’s solo album ‘The Eraser’ pictures man made doom. And there’s work like Ness (pub. 2018) – a collaboration with nature writer Robert Macfarlane – inspired by and portraying a very strange landscape, the shingle spit of longshore drift known as Orford Ness in Suffolk. Donwood started making imagery with materials found on the coast: sea coal, mud and clay. But as is often the case with this artist – who is so flexibly and sensitively attuned to making work that elicits feelings, experience and senses beyond words – the chosen media morphed to fine penmanship, detailed drawings that capture both the ephemeral atmospheres and architectural archaeology of a strip of land that’s been used for decades as a military test site. Bad Island published earlier this year on the cusp of UK’s COVID-19 pandemic is a stunning and stark wordless graphic saga. Eighty monochromatic lino prints made over a period of two years chronicle both the discovery of a rich and magical world and, with a sense of inevitability, its destruction.

So what’s with the work showcased in this latest Your Space Or Mine outing for BUILDHOLLYWOOD? Are we seeing Donwood’s sunnier side? “I’m trying to make pictures that elicit some kind of happiness. It’s a novel concept for me,” said the artist. Looking at the vertically formatted Sol, its giant refulgent sun almost seems able to warm viewers’ faces. It is a beautifully pared down design with rich flora in the foreground and skeins of woven luminosity emanating from the star at the centre of our solar system. The source of light and life.

A larger work called Set will appear on 48 sheet billboards and other sites across the country. A detail from a fundraiser released through Donwood’s new imprint The Lost Domain, Set shows a squall of birds silhouetted against a raging sky. It is sublime, and uplifting but still, there’s clearly unnerving depths to Donwood’s foray into cheering the nation.

That said, in an effort to chime with the artist’s newfound shift towards brighter subject matter, we embarked on a light-hearted chat with Donwood, proposing a baker’s dozen of questions covering fashion, beauty, celeb and lifestyle news… All in a further bid to temper the mood of gloom that stalks the land. Here we go:

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The text books tell us that Op Art is a mid-twentieth century phenomenon largely consisting of geometric abstract imagery dealing with optical illusion. Humans have, of course, been delighted by scintillating pattern for millennia but in the 1960s and 70s artists like Victor Vasarely and Bridgit Riley made works that created the illusion of movement in space.

Perhaps a style of visual art that produces perceptual ambiguity, illusion and contradictions is particularly fitting to the times we’re living through now. If the ground isn’t literally shifting beneath our feet a half-glimpse at the news, wary trips to the shops or any attempt to plan something concrete in coming weeks, perhaps months, induces a debilitating dizziness at the uncertainty of it all.

The Your Space Or Mine Build Hollywood street displays in Sheffield currently feature works by the award winning local artist Rob Lee. He is more than a dab hand at the skills required of the op artist: anamorphic installations, dazzle graphics, plays on perspective, the production of complex, paradoxical space by manipulating parallel lines and waves and the clever deployment of chromatic tension are his forte.

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In personal and commissioned works – ranging from vivid, characterful portraits to murals and illustrative design for clubs, music venues, events and campaigns – the artist Molly Hankinson produces bold and subtly detailed, inclusive celebrations of feminine vitality.

The lush digital painting titled ‘Glasgow Tenement’ features a young woman seated at a tall, open sash window. She’s perched with one leg folded over the other, smoking a cigarette. It’s the colours as much as the composition that hint at this everyday solace being never-the-less a special time. Rich mustard walls, dark greens and purples, dusky blue sky outside and languorous plant life around her all suggest a moment of quiet calm. We sense the tranquil atmosphere and connect to a figure lost in her own thoughts.

Other portraits are brasher, equally enthralling but sometimes almost formidable. In the work titled ‘Jaconelli’s’ – the Scottish/Italian café famous for its fry-ups and ice cream – a womxn sits casually on the back of her booth seat, munching a chip and looking directly at the viewer as if to say, ‘This is me, taking up my space, get used to it!’ Again, striking hues compliment Hankinson’s unerringly bold design. The use of pattern and block colour conjures thoughts of Patrick Caulfield but spying the row of sweet jars in the background there’s wit and sense of place too. Anyone for a quarter of Soor Plums?

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The BUILDHOLLYWOOD family are hugely pleased that Robinson has agreed to our displaying two poems from his recent collection ‘A Portable Paradise’ (pub. by Peepal Tree Press) on the streets of the UK. This duo of strikingly designed posters is the latest Your Space Or Mine project which gives artists and creatives a platform on the street.

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So, along with other renowned artists who’ve made bold statements in the public domain – Jenny Holzer, Barbara Kruger, the Guerrilla Girls – Wilde doesn’t mince words. Her infamous print ‘DADDY I WANT A FUCKING PONY’ being a case in point. The spoilt, petulant tone summons up Roald Dahl’s Veruca Salt character in ‘Charlie and the Chocolate Factory’ while at the same time it addresses a privileged sense of entitlement, class iniquity, the patriarchy, consumerism… And it’s funny. Wilde’s wit speaks multiple truths. Which brings us to ‘DADDY I WANT TO PAINT A LOUSY MURAL IN SHOREDITCH!’. A riff on the snarky ‘I went to X and all I got was this lousy t-shirt’ trope, is the artist perchance suggesting East London’s good folk might be overly exposed to glib, sometimes even cynical art on walls? We’ll leave that to you Dear Reader.

The BUILDHOLLYWOOD family of JACK, JACK ARTS and DIABOLICAL has collaborated with curator Olly Walker to realise this work, the latest Your Space Or Mine project which gives artists and creatives a platform on the street. With Dr.D aka Subvertiser‘s vulpine support, Wilde has made her own ironic wish come true and created an apt and timely riposte to the role that some variations of street based art have played in the gentrification of our cities.

Calling for a more thoughtful approach regarding urban interventions Wilde has said ‘I want us to be more conscious of what we’re putting out there, who we are working for and with and the wider implications of what we do. And I want us to question the effect our creations have on local communities and their attitudes.’ Wilde’s ‘LOUSY MURAL’ for Your Space Or Mine evinces both ethical concern and a motivation to visually delight viewers. Bespoke, eye-catching communication that embraces germane placement, wit and a working moral compass: The BUILDHOLLYWOOD family’s ideal artist partner for sure.

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For our Your Space Or Mine series, we at BUILDHOLLYWOOD collaborated with Kaggwa to bring her message to the street via art in our billboard spaces in London, Bristol, Glasgow and Cardiff. Kaggwa’s piece began life as a mural painted in Deptford: “The lockdown restrictions in London at the time of conceiving this project were much stricter, and like many people, I was still spending a lot of time at home consuming hours of social media content following the wave of global civil rights protests,” says Kaggwa on the art’s origin.

“The resource sharing posts and images of crowds waving placards were alluding to a shift in consciousness, but it was only once I started seeing posters in people’s windows during walks around my local area that it began to feel like something tangible outside of my Instagram echo chamber was actually changing,” she adds. As more and more people who had previously been either “apathetic or ignorant to the systemic and institutional scale of racism” were waking up to it, Kaggwa felt a strong current of hope under her despair and exhaustion. She wanted to bring that feeling to others on a large scale, so asked her friend Naomi Edmondson, who runs legal street art project Survival Techniques to collaborate with her.

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Born, educated and bred in London, Myerscough is dedicated to enriching her local community. For the Design Museum, she created their first free permanent exhibition, featuring hand-picked selections from the museum’s archive. She transformed Battersea Power Station, a notoriously drab location, with a vivid piece entitled “POWER”. She has also worked further afield, transforming the children’s bedrooms at Sheffield Hospital into spaces that actively improve the patients’ wellbeing.

For our Your Space Or Mine collaboration with Myerscough, she’s created an artwork that will be displayed at our poster sites across the country. Reading “Sun Dance”, the vibrant posters spread the positivity that Myerscough is known for. As she puts it: “It is always time to dance.”

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“I find myself drawn to the work of womxn artists which often speaks directly to my interests and concerns. At the same time, I continue to be surprised and saddened by the inequalities which perpetuate in the contemporary art world,” Neave said of the decision to launch her project. She was particularly motivated by a 2019 report from the Freelands Foundation that revealed that opportunities for women artists are increasing at a “painfully slow rate”.

Without money or connections, many marginalised voices cannot create or promote their art, but by commissioning new work, Ellipsis gives them the space to breathe. They also aim to further careers by allowing artists to expand their practice while providing visibility, sales, and support. Ellipsis currently exists online and in exhibitions in London, so we decided to collaborate with them for our Your Space Or Mine series, in which we offer artists poster space to spread their messaging.

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In 2001 she turned her avid, poetic and forensic gaze on a porn version of the Lewis Carroll classic. Banner’s Arsewoman in Wonderland screen printed in pink ink on a white billboard caused a stir when displayed at the Tate in 2002 but overall her practice elicits thoughtful, multi-layered engagement rather than ‘oo-er missus’ knee jerk reactions. Her ekphrastic transcriptions slow down perception, forcing viewers to apprehend sensation more deliberately, with an enhanced attention and self-awareness that viewing commercial productions rarely engenders.

Prose can seem transparent. While reading we discern ideas, feelings, scenarios but this act of decoding passes over or through the words so that once meanings have been gleaned the words evaporate. In Banner’s hands words, letters, even for single punctuation marks, it’s the physical form and material qualities that are bought to the fore.

In Buoys Boys (2016) the artist took full stops from five different typefaces and made them into large helium filled inflatables that bobbed around in the sky above the De La Warr Pavilion in Bexhill-on-Sea. For another work Banner spent nearly 20 years collecting the entire back catalogue of Jane’s All The World’s Aircraft books. Titled 1909 – 2011, she displays the annuals as a four-metre tall stack. Transformed into a sculpture, all the detailed description and seductive design pertaining to more than a century of aviation is hidden from sight. Denied the geeky info and sexy pics we are encouraged instead to arrive at a more complex, ethical considerations as to the subject of planes and human flight.

The artist’s Your Space Or Mine collaboration with the BUILDHOLLYWOOD family picks up on a project with a long history. During lockdown Banner started producing stark black flags bearing the single word ‘Intermission’ which she presented throughout the deserted city streets. This has now evolved into a national multi-site poster campaign. A kickback against the deceptive and seductive power of images, the glaring single word interventions punctuate the urban environment. They are arrant demands we pause and acknowledge the epic and everyday sacrifices made during this pandemic interlude, yes, but also to recognise affirmative sides to the social, economic and political impacts of Covid-19. According to Banner the enforced intermission from capitalism affords an opportunity we really should not “piss it away”, instead it’s time to rethink, recalibrate our addiction to consumer culture.

“We are being told the intermission is over, we’re being told to go shopping and buy stuff. I think we should be questioning whether the intermission is really over. The climate emergency is not over.”

Whatever form they take, from the obsessively studious to playfully absurd, corporeally salacious to surreal, experimental and shocking – In 2010 the artist suspended a decommissioned Sea Harrier fighter jet vertically from the ceiling of the neoclassical Tate Britain Duveen Gallery – Banner’s works invite viewers to reconsider their orientation towards the world of language and objects. To question the ways we read and reflect on existence. To think and act afresh.

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The BUILDHOLLYWOOD family have collaborated with The Molasses Gallery as part of their Your Space Or Mine series. The recently launched open-air project calls itself “an intangible open-air gallery promoting Black solidarity and unity” and showcases 12 works of art by 12 Black artists on poster sites across London, in locations like Tower Hamlets, Shepherd’s Bush and Camden.

As the pandemic has closed many art galleries, the Molasses Gallery aims to bring this art to the public. Curator Tanaka Saburi says: “we believe we can spur philanthropy whilst educating the public with knowledge of often pigeonholed artists within our own city of London”. The inspiring project features works by emerging and established interdisciplinary artists of African and Caribbean heritage to coincide with renewed discussion around the role and recognition of Black artists in the creative industries.

Design-led by Nina Kunzendorf, the exhibition was inspired by a poem by New York artist Gordon Parks. Written in 1975, “To a Black Artist” remains ever-relevant today, and its influence is felt throughout the vibrant work that as Saburi says, features artists “with a multitude of different narratives that share one commonality,” conveying their own unique experiences through art.

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The latest artist to collaborate on the Your Space Or Mine street poster collaboration with the BUILDHOLLYWOOD family is Carleen de Sözer. Birmingham born but living and working in London for many years De Sözer’s practice spans tattoo design to street murals, works on canvas to CD covers, clothing to delivering numerous workshops for black women artists and young people. She’s both widely recognised and greatly admired for her figurative aerosol portraits often rendered in a classic black and golden yellow palette.

For the Your Space Or Mine street poster De Sözer has set aside her signature style and opted for a stark clenched fist design in primal colours: black, red and white. Gesture of anti-authoritarian collective resistance, the BPP focussed the symbolism of a clenched fist as a demand for black civil rights, an end to police brutality as well as the public policies and institutional practices that perpetuate injustice. She explains “I first designed this image after the London riots in 2011 it was initially meant to be a t-shirt print, the design was intentionally basic and bold and slightly miss quoted, changing the (a) to (the) to fit in the allocated space on the wrist. I wanted the image to look like it came from the 60’s, from the Black Panther Party. I took the quote from Black Panther leader Fred Hampton “you can jail a revolutionary, but you can’t jail a revolution” I changed the quote to

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Born in St Kitts, West Indies, Pogus Caesar grew up in Birmingham, UK. Originally a painter, a regional and national promoter of multi-cultural arts, acclaimed photographer, journalist, award winning film director and producer, a publisher…In short a polymath. But our focus is photography.

One of Caesar’s works currently up in our cities is called Black Skin, White Palm, Same Blood (2008) and shows a huddle of young black women and men standing in the street. The men are in the background, in the foreground a woman is facing away from the camera but holding up her outstretched palm so it becomes the focal point in the centre of the frame. ‘Talk to the hand…’ No Justice. No Peace.

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For a takeover in their city of Cardiff, Patternistas created an eye-catching, bold design that wouldn’t look out of place on a one-of-a-kind rug. With beaming sunshine faces, threads of colour and words reading, “kindness is catching, pass it on”, the work is bound to bring smiles to passing commuters and people on their errands. “We wanted to inject a sense of fun and spread some happy, shiny, sunny positivity at a time when so many people are feeling insecure and isolated,” says Suzanne of their intent.

The message, Suzanne feels, is the perfect antidote to “the general anxiety about catching or spreading the virus.” Plus, as many people are leaning on each other and their communities for help and support, we’re feeling the support of our local areas more than ever, and giving it back in equal servings. “It’s true that you can’t give kindness away – it will always come back to you in one form or another and the more kindness we experience the sunnier we feel,” says Suzanne, adding that they hope the image will “make people smile both on the streets and from behind their screens.”

Patternistas’ attraction to bold colours like those in the patterns of Singapore and Zambia shines through in this piece. The pair see patterns in everything, from puddles to trees to leaves. Suzanne adds that even we are patterns if you look closely enough, and “recognising that helps deepen our connection to one another and planet”. She says, too, that, “It’s always helpful to remember that we all have more in common than that which sets us apart but in the face of a global pandemic hopefully it’s at the forefront of all of our minds.”

Forever optimistic, Suzanne sees the positive in the pandemic: “most people are appreciating cleaner air and green spaces so we’re keeping hopeful that there will be lasting positives from these darker times.”

www.patternistas.co.uk

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Hearts, eyeballs, petals, teeth, smiles, worms, wedges, a grinning grey rat and fly agaric mushroom jostle around, behind, over and in between vertically arranged black letters that spell ‘Love’. Pink flicky drips, rocket powered bananas and those miniature mountains looking very fondly at one another. The whole shebang is a psychedelic, loony love-in.

Whitehouse observed how in Birmingham “All the places where I love to eat, drink and hang out with friends are sadly closing their doors. But despite the challenges I’ve seen so much compassion and support in our community… It reminds me how bloody brilliant this city is.”

In ‘Hope’ the smiling Mickey Mouse gloves make an appearance again, the rat wearing shades is there too but he’s pink this time. The word ‘Hope’ beams out amidst the mayhem in sunny yellow. The spatial playfulness in Whitehouse’s work is astonishing. If ‘Love’ has the feel of a freaky featured inferno, ‘Hope’ with its planets and spaceship reaches beyond the clouds to infinity.

Both works afford a joyful panacea to corona worries. The scramble of craziness also reminds us what happy gatherings used to be like. Whitehouse’s clever compositions let us imagine his visual cacophonies go beyond the frame, as if they are snapshots of some jubilant crowd on a beach, in the street, at a club. Meanwhile it’s a delight to lose yourself in these hypnotic, hallucinatory works. While we wait for the lovely days to return.

www.super-freak.co.uk

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Your Space Or Mine is a side project in which the BUILDHOLLYWOOD family offer its poster space to artists in cities across the UK to spread their positive messaging. Right now, it’s more important than ever – lots of people are lonely and in need of uplifting messages. Keen to bring positivity to the streets, Woollvin’s work will be on display in Sheffield.

Called “House Party”, the piece spreads warmth outside while reinforcing the possible magic of staying inside. In gentle but bright colours of pleasing turquoise, pink and yellow shades, the piece features fantastical scenes in a cutaway illustration of a house. It shows what’s possible if you only use your imagination: dancing cats, an octopus eating cake in the bath, and bears wrestling in the living room are among the fun images Woollvin chose to create.

Also available as a print with 25% of profits going to NHS Charities Together, Woollvin’s work breaks the idea that staying inside is boring. “The ‘Your Space Or Mine’ project allowed me to embrace the many ways households are managing isolation,” she says, adding, “Focusing on the small moments of joy we have found in our homes, whether you’re binge-watching tv, studying the stars or eating cake in the bath!”

Just like Woollvin’s other work, House Party is playful, but it carries deeper messages: “It enables me to spread positivity to the wider community,” she says.

www.bethanwoollvin.com

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Baillie is a graphic designer based in Edinburgh who currently works with cultural organisations like V&A Dundee, Glasgow Short Film Festival and Dundee Contemporary Arts. For the collaboration, he has created a bold, blue poster with bright yellow, green and pink block lettering reading “Ordinary People Doing Extraordinary Things”. With a backdrop of images like cash registers, nurse’s uniforms and parcels, it highlights the necessary role that people from delivery workers to NHS staff to retail workers have played throughout the last few months. Plus, hopefully, it’ll help us to realise that their role is not yet over, even if we are allowed to go to the shops.

“Ordinary People Doing Extraordinary Things” is a fitting phrase to honour the way in which we have all worked towards safeguarding each other during the pandemic,” says Baillie of his design. As well as the visual references to key jobs, there are some more hidden nods to the various roles ordinary people have played: “The stitching line in the top-right corner of the design is a nod to the individuals and organisations who have given their time and resources to make scrubs and PPE, as well as the wider story of people all over the country who have been doing what they can to help, whether it be through volunteering or simply doing their very best to follow guidance and keep themselves and others safe.”

Even the colourful lettering designed and created by Baillie holds a deeper meaning and message: “The design also features bespoke type, with each letter built-up using geometric blocks, again alluding to the idea of people from different walks of life coming together.” We’ve had to all work together in recent months, helping out neighbours and friends with everyday tasks and keeping each other safe.

Baillie hopes that when ordinary people see the poster out in the streets (especially now they’re allowed out more regularly) it’ll “help to brighten up their day”. He wants to reinforce that everyone’s experience has been unique: “I imagine they’ll have their own examples of what the title “Ordinary People Doing Extraordinary Things’ means to them.” While things are easing up, the fight for many ordinary people is not over, the BUILDHOLLYWOOD family will continue to use their street space to honour them and to offer bright messages of hope to the community.

martinbaillie.com

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All Social Recluse’s poster designs feature strong graphic linear representations set against subtle single colour backgrounds. In ‘Don’t You Forget About Me’ the famous equestrian statue of the Duke of Wellington has, of course, somewhat incongruous headgear. The ritual of crowning the Duke with a traffic cone epitomises Glaswegian’s anti-authoritarian spirit and irrepressible humour. The lyric derives from the 1985’ Simple Minds’ hit and is one of the most popular songs to come out of the city. “I wanted to get into people’s heads and talk to them,” the designer said.

The haunting refrain of ‘Oh Let Me Tell You That I Love You… That I Think About You All The Time’ from the song Caledonia is aptly paired with the silhouettes of famous Glasgow music venues. The sense of longing for home and family is palpable and reminds us how much we’re missing the sounds and companionship of attending gigs, concerts and communal singalongs.

Another famous Glasgow venue, the Barrowland Ballroom, sits beneath Jerry Rafferty and Joe Egan’s ‘Stuck In The Middle With You’. It’s a lyric that sums up the occasional despair of being cooped up inside with people we love but from time to time may feel we’ve seen quite enough. Obviously for Quentin Tarantino film fans it conjures up an altogether more disturbing instance of lockdown but maybe we’ll draw a veil over that one. Real life is shocking enough.

instagram.com/socialrecluse/

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In ‘Staying Apart, Always Together’ we see set against a rising sun the silhouette of two figures standing apart. Their shadows, however, are holding hands like a couple, like friends or family. Pre-quarantine this poster might’ve seemed a tad saccharine but its clear message and tender sentiment will be seen by many passers-by as pretty heart-warming right now.

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The #medicineonthewall collaboration between Dr John Lee of Bristol University’s iBA programme in Medical Humanities and the People’s Republic of Stokes Croft (aka the ‘PRSC’ who, from 2007, have been at the forefront of defending public spaces, cultural freedoms and promoting alternative voices across the city) brings together local graffiti writers and street artists – including Ryder, Decay, Uncredited, 3dom and Sepr – to prescribe ‘Graphic Medicine’ on urban walls.

Lee explains, “#medicineonthewalls resists the notion of a standard patient with a standard disease, it tries to make an emotional engagement with medicine and health, reaching out to diverse publics in ways that can outpace official channels of communication.”

What’s a progressive healthcare initiative and radical activist enterprise doing teaming up with the epitome of commerce: a creative out-of-home agency family? That said, over the years the BUILDHOLLYWOOD family has fine form when it comes to enlightened partnerships supporting ethical, community driven projects. And this #medicineonthewalls Your Space Or Mine collaboration with BUILDHOLLYWOOD is another great example.

So, because not everyone has a home in which to shelter, the phrase ‘Stay In’ appears on boards across town. In place of getting names up, occupying risky territory, for the time being #medicineonthewalls has bought counterculture in from the cold. Dynamic, dripping, shattered scripts that usually occupy brickwork, bridges, trains or highpoints in the townscape, have given voice, generously lent their spraycan banditry, to a cause that has everyone’s well-being at heart.

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O’Hara works across different disciplines: mural painting, design, and illustration. She’s particularly fascinated by fluidity and bold colour combinations: “I’m interested in capturing the fluidity of an image in motion,” she says. At a time when many people are looking to feel uplifted and positive, work like O’Hara’s, with its flowing shapes and bright colours, is more necessary than ever.

Displayed on billboards across Brighton and Hove, her collaboration reads, “everything is an opportunity,” in her trademark wavy text against a background of bright, flowing pink, orange and blue shapes. It’s a reminder to use this time carefully, if you can, not just to reflect but to do things you really want to: start new hobbies and projects, or keep in touch with friends.

The billboard is a testament to O’Hara’s optimism: “For me it’s important that I try and find something positive in every bad situation, perhaps something that I have learnt,” she tells us. The intention with her work is always to uplift, and on a large scale like this, it’s even easier to bring joy to many. “During this time, I think it’s particularly important that I do this with my work, in any way I can, which makes this the perfect collaboration,” she says, adding: “I wanted to create something bold and clear. Almost a strip back of what I usually do, whilst still keeping it in style.”

O’Hara’s positive, playful outlook on life feeds into her work’s ethos, making her projects, which are often on large scales, uplifting. She’s transformed many outdoor spaces, from walls to basketball courts, and her work with us is powerful, with a simple goal: “I want people to walk by and feel positively powerful and uplifted.”

www.loisohara.co.uk

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‘Let’s Make This Love Normal’ and ‘Kindness At Its Proper Level’ are big-hearted thoughts… Purnell’s Your Space Or Mine COVID-19 collaboration with the BUILDHOLLYWOOD family is the latest in a long line of conscientious visual interventions on the urban environment. His Add Art project promotes likeminded designers’ and artists’ work. Selling Virtues is another initiative that seeks to critically examine the slew of unsettling messages and imagery we are often bombarded with in our towns and cities.

Purnell noted that “This pandemic has made clear we can’t maintain current lifestyles; if everything stops for just a few weeks, the effects are beyond comprehension. It has exposed to some, the need for family, to others the gift of community.”

In all three poster iterations hopeful and anticipatory phrases are broken into single words that range across bands of fuchsia pink and sap green, marigold orange, bumblebee yellow and clear sky blue. The minimal design – five bars of colour on a black ground – make Purnell’s heartfelt calls for fellow feeling all the more prominent.

Block black capitalised letters and no-frills kerning qualify the rainbow sentiment. Yes, the isolation, rigours and grief of past weeks, months have often bought out, demanded the best of people. But the stark design communicates an urgency: we cannot afford to lose sight of newfound acts of kindness, love and community. Neither must we forget the light these times have shone on social and occupational injustice.

There’s a lot of talk about things returning to ‘normal’, getting back to work, rebooting the economy… We’re not going back to normal. We will go forward to something else. We have to. Visual creatives with a conscience can perhaps help direct our future path, our future actions, so as to achieve post COVID-19 a fairer, kinder and more inclusive ‘Community Like Never Before’.

www.micahpurnell.com

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The BUILDHOLLYWOOD family have teamed up with Ilori to bring his trademark colour to the street yet again with their Your Space Or Mine project. With a message of “better days are coming, I promise” in 70s-style text against a vibrant backdrop of orange, blue, green pink and yellow, the poster is both uplifting and meaningful.

The piece will be on view in our poster site in Blackfriars, taking inspiration from the sketches for the new A&E department at Westminster Hospital, which Ilori will also be designing. The project is in collaboration with charity CW+, the official charity of the Chelsea and Westminster Hospital NHS Foundation Trust, and Kensington and Chelsea Art Week, who are creating temporary installations in West London.

Speaking about the thought process behind his work, Ilori told us that, “‘better days are coming, I promise’ is a message that I have been singing to myself and loved ones during the pandemic.” He added: “The message has been my therapist during these tough times and has given me hope when sometimes I feel like this will never come to an end.” The news right now is often distressing and painful, but Ilori wants us to take away positive thoughts from our current situation.

“The NHS staff are working to save people’s lives and I can’t imagine what it feel like for them. They must be also struggling to feel like better days are coming, but sometimes we all need a reminder that they are.” Ilori hopes that his work will contribute to the good mood of both NHS staff and regular people as they go about their routines: “I want the artwork to give people a sense of hope and provide them with joy, bringing them some comfort where they may feel pain and uncertainty.”

He adds, “I pray that when people walk past or look at my message on the streets of London It uplifts their soul and spirit because we are in this together.” We are proud to work with Ilori on this important project – we need uplifting words and images right now, and Ilori’s work is always bound to inspire.

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Recognising this hypocrisy, artist Craig Oldham wanted to respond to Patel’s comments and the current situation with art. The agency family approached him to put out positive messages on its poster sites in Manchester, Oldham created a bright, colourful piece, which in large, bold lettering, reads: “may they never be deemed low-skilled again”. The text is set against the backdrop of a list of “low-skilled”, now key workers: teachers, warehouse coordinators and therapy professionals to name a few. It spotlights the people that we’ve often not only dismissed in society, but whose massive importance has now been recognised.

Speaking to Design Week recently, Oldham elaborated on his motivations for creating the poster: “It has taken a global pandemic for the government to recognise the value of all of its citizens and workforces. In only February of this year, Patel’s comments and, more to the point, the government’s policy on what determines a person’s ‘value’, are ridiculous.”

Oldham calls this particular form of hypocrisy “snobbery”, noting that the key workers’ input has always been integral to this country. “These workers clean, care, and deliver for this country, and they always have, global pandemic or not, so to suddenly switch just because they are now propping us all up as a nation and you’ve realised how important they are made me a little angry.”

While the work was born partly from Oldham’s anger, he says he wants it to serve as a positive show of solidarity with “all of those people continuing to work despite the crisis, supporting, caring, cleaning, delivering for every single one of us.” He points to the designs that ordinary people are spreading across the country as a symbol of the ways in which creativity is helping us through the crisis: the rainbows in support of the NHS that adorn every street in the form of paint, crayon, paper and collage, intended to uplift key workers.

“These rainbows are probably the result of trying to keep the kids entertained in tough times for families, but they’re also a creative gesture, symbolic of communities reaching out to one another with a promise of hope and better times on the horizon. That’s a real, powerful, graphic symbol, that fulfils a role of community and connectivity probably more so than any polished poster could.” he says. Above all, Oldham hopes that this pandemic will enforce what we now know to be true: that these workers didn’t become important overnight: “They always have been, and will continue to be, Key Workers.”

Download the prints here

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In response to these issues, we collaborated with creative advertising duo James Hodson and Jason Keet to disperse useful information while disrupting the mundanity of our current lockdown with wartime-style posters on our poster sites in London and other regions. The pieces, modelled on WWII messaging, tackle different coronavirus issues in a humorous way with slogans like “Britons, your country needs you (to sit on the sofa)” and “only dorks meet for walks”.

“They’re modern takes on classic war posters, designed to give people clear instructions about what to do in the crisis, but delivered with a sense of humour and style,” explain the duo. Each different poster takes on a different, confusing topic to do with the pandemic, such as hand-washing, social distancing, panic-buying and weekly shopping. “Pretty much anything you’re supposed to do or not to do, we’ve got a poster for it.” they add.

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Artist Mark Titchner, whose bold work often features on billboards, buildings and other public spaces, has produced some stunning artwork for our collaboration. Mark wants to offer hope and boost our morale through his colourful posters which are up in 10 cities across the UK. With many of us only leaving the house for our daily errands and exercise, the bright, uplifting pieces are an antidote to the monotony we are all facing.

Reading “PLEASE BELIEVE THESE DAYS WILL PASS”, the bright work is a rallying cry for hope that disrupts the urban environment. It’s likely that Mark’s latest work will be seen more on social media than on the street, something that’s different for someone who so often works in the public sphere, but however you see it, we hope that it will reach the people who need the message the most.

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In response to the devastating riots of 1985, the ‘son’s of Birmingham’, artist Pogus Caesar and Poet Benjamin Zephaniah, collaborated to create a city-wide, urban intervention of billboards and poster sites at street-level locations across the city.

The campaign revisits a period of social unrest and turmoil, a visual reminder of the history of the streets in which the poster sites stand.  The powerful black and while images, taken at the height of the Handsworth riots by Caesar on a 35mm Canon he still used today, were showcased alongside new, reflective poems written by poet Benjamin Zephaniah.

The creative pairing resulted in striking, thought-provoking visuals intended to stimulate and encourage conversation.  The project is part of an ongoing Jack Arts initiative, Your Space or Mine, in which we use our poster sites in unique and inspiring ways to provide a platform for artists and creatives.  It was developed in partnership with Flying Leaps an artist street display project that seeks to make unexpected, positive contributions to our urban environments.

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Working across a variety of mediums, Philip’s work is bright, eye-catching and modern, which made it ideal for our latest poster collaborations. Intending to bring positivity and light to dark days and dark streets, we wanted to work with Philip to create a series of posters for display across Cardiff.

The pieces, which show bright red hands forming a heart shape, read “God Bless the NHS” in blue lettering. The message is simple, designed to inspire, disrupt, and hopefully bring some much-needed hope to the thousands of health workers trekking to work in cities every day.

Philip wanted to acknowledge the hard work of not just doctors and nurses, but everyone working on the front lines to care for COVID-19 patients and other people every single day: “There are some amazing people working on the frontline right now, and not just all the wonderful doctors and nurses putting their lives at risk, but all the carers, shop workers, bus drivers, delivery drivers. all doing a fantastic job. You make us all very proud.” he says of the work.

Philip’s pieces, which are visible on our poster sites in Cardiff, are a reminder of the life-risking work that those people are undertaking every single day just to keep us safe.

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None of these more established names could claim to have had a better spring lockdown than No Signal, though. You couldn’t move for timeline debate around the station’s flagship show #NS10v10 which pitted artists like Skepta and Giggs and Missy Elliot and Busta Rhymes against each other, with over 200,000 listening in and voting on Twitter as Wizkid took his clash with Vybz Kartel 10-0.

The team is over 40 volunteers deep, spanning producers and DJs to designers and social media managers all focused on the importance of keeping things fun and community-focused, not surprising given the Sonubi brothers’ history as promoters with their Recess parties. Education, information and entertainment are the three key pillars for the station who’ve labelled themselves as #blackradio, not shying away from supporting social causes like BLM and The Black Curriculum.

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While the dreaded ‘rona might have made wooden soldiers of some, Cornershop’s superb ‘England is a Garden’ – released 6th March 2020 on the eve of UK’s first lockdown – has afforded rockin’ solace aplenty this year.

The first studio album in eight years Tjinder Singh and Ben Ayres said they knew they were onto something special when Rolling Stone writer David Fricke – having already supplied the sleeve notes – asked for more time, “to do the album justice.” The hunch proved right as the disc later went on to feature in 2020’s album of the year recommendations in Mojo, BBC Radio 6 Music, Uncut, Record Collector, Shindig! and more.

BUILDHOLLYWOOD were, of course, on board for the original poster campaign back in March. Singh explains that the artwork – featuring an androgynous warrior/saint-like character – was designed by long-time Cornershop friend and collaborator Nick Edwards. “…It’s certainly part of the charm of the album, we thought it was different and striking enough to make a great street poster. The image provokes questions, like the album title itself.”

Singh went on to observe, “One positive thing about the enforced isolation so many endured was that more and more people got to listen to the record and the albums upbeat nature helped people stay positive.” It is a brilliant, multi-layered listen. Full of thoughtful lyric provocations and their characteristic synthesis of instruments and broad musical influences while at the same time it’s unabashedly dancey and fun with earworms to spare.

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His love of music is another big influence that often seeps into his work, and especially his shows, which can be traced back to his parents who started one of Scotland’s first reggae nights in Dundee in the late 70s after meeting in the city. He cites the music he was exposed to growing up as a key part of his creative education and built on his family’s history by recreating Reggae Klub for one night only at V&A Dundee last year with his dad Jeffrey, aka IMan SLYGo, playing records and his mum Maureen leading a knitting workshop.

Challenging the notion of what fashion shows ‘should’ be, his AW18 collection ‘Red Clay’ drew on the fashion of Miles Davis and was presented in the form of London artists including James Massiah and Nabihah Iqbal performing while wearing the pieces. He’s also worked with Adidas and Fred Perry, again taking inspiration from the latter’s musical heritage fusing punk and reggae for a AW20 collection that featured a liberal sprinkling of tartan among reworked classics. Community in collaboration are important to Daley too – together with Fred Perry he launched a grant for unsigned artists to go along with his collection and a section of the profits from his Reggae Klub t-shirts went to jazz education and artist development organisation Tomorrow’s Warriors.

The BUILDHOLLYWOOD family are excited to be linking up with Nicholas for his first poster campaign as we begin a series of fashion collaborations at a tough time for the industry and emerging designers in particular. With spaces across London, we’re celebrating Daley with a retrospective of his last year’s work featuring the photography of Piczo and Bolade Banjo as well as the illustrations of Gaurab Thakali. The campaign also highlights his upcoming 2021 Now Gallery immersive exhibition RETURN TO SLYGO, a ‘celebration of music, culture, fashion and ancestry’ which will blend his three core values of community, culture and craftsmanship. The campaign will also start up again for a second phase before London Fashion Week in February. Check out the interview below.

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