A decade ago, André Anderson made a book with five of his neighbours on St. Raphaels estate in North West London. Titled Authors of the Estate it contained writing and photography about the estate along with a step-by-step guide to being an author. He printed 1,000 copies and put one through every door. He was, to use his own phrase, turning council houses into publishing houses.

“I knew that if you frame things correctly, people who don’t even consider themselves artists can come together, and learn together, and actually make something together,” he says.

“I also wanted to create a type of environment whereby artwork comes out of it, but where the people involved are just everyday people. Where the moment feels like an event itself, with all the flair so it felt like a party – a cultural memory.”

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Back in 1995, War Child brought together some of the biggest names in music to record an album in one day. The result, HELP, raised over a million pounds for the charity, which had been set up to support children caught up in the Bosnian conflict. Fast forward to 2021 and a label, War Child Records, was set up to re-release four albums released by the charity between 2002 and 2009.

Each album saw artists covering beloved records, collaborating with other artists, or donating new songs. 1 Love was released in 2002 with a track list that included Sugababes and The Prodigy (the latter remaking The Specials’ ‘Ghost Town’). The following year saw Hope released, in response to the Iraq War, with exclusive tracks and covers from the likes of George Michael, Spiritualized, Beth Orton and Yusuf Islam. 2005’s Help! A Day in the Life celebrated the tenth anniversary of the original and in 2009, War Child Presents Heroes had a collaboration between Lily Allen and Mick Jones from The Clash and covers from Beck, Estelle and Franz Ferdinand.

Now, HELP(2) is poised to repeat that success. Recorded over one intense week at Abbey Road Studios in November last year and executive produced by James Ford, the project was unveiled via the surprise release of a brand-new Arctic Monkeys track. Alongside original recordings, the album features a run of standout covers, including Olivia Rodrigo’s take on ‘The Book of Love’ and Fontaines D.C.’s powerful reimagining of Sinéad O’Connor’s ‘Black Boys on Mopeds’.

Additionally, there’s an all-star band pulled together by Damon Albarn. Alongside vocals from Kae Tempest and Grian Chatten, ‘Flags’ also features Johnny Marr on guitar, Adrian Utley from Portishead, Dave Okumu of The Invisible, Seye from Gorillaz and Ezra Collective drummer and bandleader Femi Koleoso.

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His art is as colourful as his camera roll. Having grown up in Cambridge but long since made Bristol his home, Gresham hasn’t so much carved out a career as an artist as he’s painted one — one vibrant shape, mural or installation at a time. Since picking up a spray can as a teenager, his work has pulsed with colour, movement and that unmistakable graphic rhythm rooted in skate culture and 80s-90s design. He’s been making art professionally for over a decade now, and his designs have only grown brighter while, in his eyes, the one around him has dimmed.

His latest collaboration with BUILDHOLLYWOOD, an enormous takeover at Bristol’s Lakota site, responds directly to a study that found the world is, quite literally, losing its colour. Researchers analysing thousands of consumer products from 1800 to the present day discovered a steady slide toward greys, blacks and whites. A global drift toward monochrome.

“You don’t really notice it happening” he says. “When we were younger, everyone had Burberry phone cases on their 3310s — now we’ve all just got black iPhones. No one wears brightly coloured socks anymore. It’s all white or black. You can feel it’s lacking.”

Gresham’s response isn’t political, nor ironic. It’s instinctive — a reminder of how colour makes us feel. “You made me question my whole life,” he laughs, when asked why the world needs more colour. “For me, it releases endorphins. If I walk past something and think, ‘Oh, that’s a nice colour,’ that gives me a buzz. It makes me feel good. It’s good for the soul.”

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Bristol has long been a city of movement; of ships, trade and migration, but also of protest and resistance. Memorial Dance, created by artist and former Bristol Lord Mayor Cleo Lake with Nigerian-born visual artist BÓLÁRÌNWÁ, channels that motion into an act of remembering. Drawing together artists and dancers, elders and young people through the Decolonising Memory Project, it transforms the body into an archive and the street into a site of reflection, where history and healing meet through movement.

Memorial Dance was built through community workshops that welcomed dancers and non-dancers alike, while holding an African-descent backbone at its core. Two anchor masterclasses seeded the choreography with specific diasporic lineages: Bristol teacher Norman “Rubba” Stephenson, whose practice carries threads from 1970s workshops by Steel ’n’ Skin through to the city’s own ensemble Ekome, and Latisha Cesar, whose Haitian spiritual forms locate the dance within a wider Atlantic continuum.

Bristol’s cultural infrastructure is part of the story too. The former Inkworks, now the Kuumba Centre, and organisations like Artspace Lifespace map a long arc of independent spaces where Black creativity has organised, gathered and thrived; it was at an Artspace Lifespace show that Cleo first encountered BÓLÁRÌNWÁ’s work and invited him to collaborate. The project’s original spark also came from a very Bristol kind of pragmatism: at the Regenerations conference, choreographer Kwesi Johnson urged Cleo not to wait for permission to reframe the city’s monuments; use an AR app, write your own plaque, expose another truth. That insurgent energy runs valiantly throughout Memorial Dance to this day.

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Created by award-winning photographer Colin Moody and writer/musician Jasmine Ketibuah-Foley, the book captures five years of Bristol nightlife through striking photography, personal reflections, and conversations with artists, promoters, and venue owners. Their collaboration grew out of real nights on Bristol’s dance floors, or as Colin puts it, “our own mini tribe,” a shared act of love and protection for the spaces that make people feel safe, creative, and connected. 

In a fitting celebration, the book’s artwork was unveiled at the iconic Lakota, one of Bristol’s most beloved and enduring nightclubs, providing the perfect backdrop for this homage to the city’s nightlife. The collaboration with JACK ARTS to exhibit the work outside Lakota was a deliberate choice, returning the images to the streets and communities that inspired them. “Displaying the book on billboards makes sense,” says Jazz. “Our story belongs out there on the night.”

We interviewed Colin Moody and Jasmine Ketibuah-Foley, the creative duo behind Up All Night: A Bristol Nightlife Story. They discuss the passion driving their “love letter” to Bristol’s club culture and the power of art to capture community spirit. From dance floors to billboards, their project celebrates the city that never stops moving. 

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Max King has a knack for showing familiar objects and structures in a new light, and often in completely different proportions. Working in sculpture and installations, he toys with scale and perspective to create new encounters for his audiences, whether by collapsing buildings and other architectural structures into miniature models, or by blowing up small, everyday items such as pin badges into large-scale pieces that people can walk around. To him, presenting typical places and objects in atypical ways can be both magical and thought-provoking at the same time.

Born in Norfolk, now based in London, King studied graphic communication design at Central Saint Martins before doing an MA in Sculpture at the Royal College of Art. Different as they may seem, both courses left a profound imprint on his practice. His design education has no doubt been useful when it comes to the planning and construction of his sculptures. More importantly, it has meant that he keeps the functionality and experience of his pieces front of mind, always considering how people will interact with them. “I think a lot about the audience and how the audience will explore the objects, and I think that comes from my design background and always thinking about the user experience,” he says. “I know lots of people, especially artists, who don’t do that. But I always think about how someone seeing the work is going to move around it and how they are going to experience it, which is key.”

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It’s a fitting collaboration between Intoart and BUILDHOLLYWOOD, two organisations that reject the idea of art as something reserved for those who can afford white-walled gallery tickets or navigate institutional sliding doors. Making art accessible in public space is profoundly symbolic and implicitly political. It interrupts the city’s art-as-marketing landscape, challenges who is allowed to be visible, and insists that creativity belongs to everyone.

That sense of connection was first felt and found in 2024, when Intoart artist Andre Williams unveiled Let It Be Me in the pocket garden of Camberwell New Road, a bright, carmine coloured public sculpture commissioned by BUILDHOLLYWOOD a short 12 months ago. Andre’s work is invitational and vibrant, a conversational four word prompt of “let it be me” that asks passersby to reflect and ask the question; “why should it be me?”. In many ways, the artists answer the question by virtue of their work, using the billboards as a platform for artists to be seen on their own terms. “They’ll probably think about things they’ve made assumptions about when they see the work,” says artist Nick Fenn in reference to the public observing the billboards. “They might start paying attention.”

Andre’s Let It Be Me sculpture with Intoart and BUILDHOLLYWOOD has gone on to inspire this resplendent 25th anniversary series made up of 16 unique billboards, speaking to something deeper than accolades, and instead gesturing towards the urgency of access, visibility, and the right to be seen. “I hope people think, wow, that’s amazing, ‘Who are these people? Who are these artists?’” says Nancy Clayton. “In some galleries it’s always the same artists, but we are trying to break down the barriers.”

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That instinct to document, to preserve, to show the value in the communities she knows best, is where her practice begins. It’s why she talks about “building sideways, not upwards.” It’s why she brings her friends and neighbours onto runways or reconstructs her grandmother’s living room at Fashion Week. Sheffield, and the community it represents, isn’t just her background, it’s her compass.

Her Yemeni heritage sharpened that perspective from the start. She grew up surrounded by its traditions, from the generosity and selflessness that ran through everyday life, to the visual richness of her family home. One room might be a traditional Yemeni space with patterned rugs, heavy curtains, and gold-framed mirrors. Next to it, the “British living room” as she jokingly calls it, with sofas facing the TV. At family gatherings, her aunties in abayas and hijabs would sit alongside cousins in Nike tracksuits. Breakfast might mean a full English, but always with Yemeni chai tea.

At the same time, youth clubs gave her values somewhere to grow. Spaces similar to Reach Up, where Kazna now volunteers, founded by Safiya Saeed (now Lord Mayor of Sheffield), became second homes for her and her siblings. Her parents were young when they had them, and youth clubs offered another safe, collective environment. Kazna says they instilled the importance of community from the beginning, lessons that have stayed with her even as most of those spaces have since disappeared from Sheffield.

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“Magic” is a word that comes up regularly with photographer Dennis Morris. He felt it when he saw a TV for the first time as a child, when he encountered a box in the corner of a room that he thought could hear him speak. He experienced it again when he saw an image printed from a negative for the very first time. There’s a sense of wonder in those early moments in his life that still seems visceral all these decades later. But when it comes to his own achievements, it was never magic; it was tenacity. It was all Morris’s doing.

Born in Kingston, Jamaica, Morris moved to London as a child, where he was introduced to photography at the tender age of nine. By the time he was a teenager, he had begun to forge a career in photography, producing timeless, instantly recognisable images of 1970s musicians such as Bob Marley, the Sex Pistols, and Marianne Faithfull, as well as later music acts like Oasis and Radiohead, which appeared on magazine covers and record sleeves. He also worked as a designer and an art director at Island Records.

Many of his portraits show these musicians’ performative side: the pomp of the Pistols, the enigmatic drama of Marianne Faithfull. But his “fly on the wall” approach also uncovered their hidden depths – a pain or an uncertainty, perhaps. He has always wanted to show the three-dimensionality of people, a philosophy he also applied to his photographs of everyday people going about life, whether in his project documenting Black British life in Hackney, his intimate series made in Southall’s Sikh communities, or his poignant photographs taken when returning to Kingston.

First image: Babylon by van, London, 1973 © Dennis Morris

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Monthly wanderings through a complex array of urban environments in the vicinity of Hoxton and Spitalfields might be enriching enough but Alisa adds a further dimension by introducing prompts, themes and situations that reattuned participants’ experience of walking in the city.

Here’s a sample: ‘As you walk, try to step on as many different surfaces as you can find.’

‘On your walk, write down every word or phrase you notice around you. When you finish the walk, read all you have written out loud back in the streets.’ ‘Choose something in the far distance. Walk towards it until you reach it.’ ‘Walk as slowly as you can.’…

These and many more ostensibly simple instructions invite walkers to better notice, feel, remember, touch, smell, hear and otherwise experience unexpected nuances of moving through urban space and place.

For the climactic event the exterior panels at The Carwash were adorned with the 12 posters, a different colour way for each month, that advertised the project throughout the previous year.

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The photographer known as Suede is running through the list of individuals she’s celebrating in her forthcoming billboard series. Amongst the fifteen portraits will be plastered across London, there’s stylist Valeria Chrampani; painter and actor Adébayo Bolaji, chef Abby Lee who runs Mambow in Clapton and UKG original, MC Bushkin of Heartless Crew. She is, she says, engaged in cultural documentation, catching cultural moments as they happen. Visually, it’s a super-charged, high-octane treat. ‘I’m chasing energy over perfection,’ she explains. ‘My approach is always the same: very real and never over-produced.’

Suede – real name Kay Holden – is using the spotlight offered by artist celebration programme Your Space Or Mine to celebrate others. But this is her experience: of being supported on the way up and then extending a hand back down to new artists as they’re coming through. The BUILDHOLLYWOOD  x Suede collaboration ‘Everyday People’ speaks to the same dynamics: a portrait series exploring the individuals and communities that express London culture, and shape it, too.

Growing up in Frome, a town in Somerset, Suede fell in love with US sports culture with a strong side-order of music and fashion. After moving to Cardiff for university, where she coached the basketball team, she emigrated to Australia and then the USA. ‘I’ve been in a million different scenes from surf punk in Sydney to the queer scene in New York,’ she says. ‘I’m a melting pot of inspiration’. Gradually, friends began asking her to shoot their music videos or to help with styling and creative direction.

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Moving fluidly across text, performance, installation, and image, Sodipo is a multidisciplinary force whose work interrogates and reimagines Blackness, transness, and diasporic identity. Her practice is richly layered, often drawing from archives both digital and personal, while remaining focused on what might come next for future generations. Having been shown, read, watched, and performed across countless galleries, institutions, and centres of excellence across the globe, Sodipo’s work has found a new home this summer in the UK, this time on city streets, marking a public illustration of what Pride represents in principle and practice for Sodipo and the communities she feels at home in.

Born in London and raised in Nigeria until the age of eleven, Sodipo’s sense of identity has long been shaped by migration, multiplicity, and the navigation of cultural space. More than physical place, it was the internet that served as her earliest landscape of creative re-imagining. “I was a Tumblr girly”, Sodipo laughs, “so I access a lot of archival material through the internet”. In this way, a ubiquitous household object, the flickering Wi-Fi router, becomes a kind of commonality, one that connects her to a broader constellation of Black life and thought. That little plastic box that acted as the director of many of our early millennial and Gen Z childhood antics remains a steadfast reminder of the vast chasm of knowledge we have at our fingertips; “I’m thinking about how we access history nowadays”, shares Sodipo. “I hold like 10,000 years on my computer, you know?”

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In this new work, set on a central stone plinth – which will also be flanked by three large-scale billboards for the launch – Fishel overturns what we might expect of public sculpture. Given the toppling of the infamous Colston Statue during the Black Lives Matter protests of 2020, Bristol is sensitive to what gets placed on its public plinths. So often the history of sculpture in public places has tended toward the overblown, commemorating public figures – monarchs, emperors, military leaders, slave traders – deemed worthy of monumentalising. Fishel cuts through all that. Rather than a recognisable figure, aloof and standing over us, she elevates one part of an unspecified body: a single limb. Titled Praise You 2.0 (2025) her leg is an assemblage constructed from sheet metal, coloured in vibrant royal blue and lime green, with its joints and internal framework exposed, giving it an unapologetically DIY feel. Praise You 2.0 pays tribute to strength, vulnerability and fun, qualities that Fishel argues should sit side by side, rather than in opposition, in a functional society.

Here Fishel talks to Lizzie Lloyd about the unsung value of domestic workers in the NHS. She touches on the power of art to share common human experiences, the urgency of fighting political injustices, and the everyday individual actions that make all our lives a little better.

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The heat is rising, the clock is ticking, the feed is reloading. Our devices are an extension of our limbs now – benign digital growths, still attached by lithe, fleshy tendrils to our febrile, stubby digits. We are tethered to them, pacified by them, and beguiled by them. And yet, despite our tacit sinking into their enchanting 4G catchment, there remains hope: that these screens are also on our side – informing us, educating us, and offering access and agency to challenge more potent powers. This is the paradox that Jazz Grant’s new work confronts – a visceral, multi-part billboard series exploring what it means to witness a world in collapse, and still find a way to respond.

Known for her emotionally charged collage and stop-motion animation, Jazz Grant’s practice is grounded in instinct, texture, and storytelling. Her current billboard takeover spans London and unfolds in four acts, from eyes burning with fire to silhouettes locked in protest, it captures a narrative arc of grief, rage, and ultimately, resistance. “I was really aware of how much I’ve been observing the burning world, both metaphorically and literally burning on my phone,” she says. “Then I made the connection that the billboards themselves almost look like a phone screen”.

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From the highway to Coachella stateside, to the BBC screen on British soil, Joseph Melhuish’s work is far reaching, now finding itself in London with a physical tilt to his typically digital practice. Working in collaboration with Creative Review and BUILDHOLLYWOOD’s Creative Studio, Joseph has dreamt up a striking two-part, three-dimensional billboard that experiments with form and subverts structure, delivering Listen To Your Heart, a piece of public art that invites curiosity and tests the limits of optimism.

Installed across two billboards, the upright digital screen features a blissed-out visage. Eyes shut, pursed smiley lips and fleshy tendril bangs, looking ever so serene in her oversize cans. On the adjacent billboard, a pair of hands rips apart a forty-foot-wide hoodie top to reveal pinkie-purple cardiovascular gore and a cute cartoon heart with a jack plugged into it. Somewhat freakily the headphone cable meandering between these two very special builds resembles an umbilical cord. Head and heart conjoined like a mother and child, expressing how lifesaving it is to listen to the beating music of our hearts.

Start to finish, BUILDHOLLYWOOD’s Creative Studio worked closely with Creative Review and Joseph to realise this ambitious, groundbreaking work – from idea generation and concept development through to production and installation. BUILDHOLLYWOOD’s Creative Studio’s operation is home to a dynamic team of artists, designers, set builders, prop makers, and carpenters based in a 4000 ft purpose built studio nestled in a leafy pocket of North West London.

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Following the success of their debut event, Drag in the Arcades, featuring local drag icons Victoria Scone and Jolene Dover, the team secured a permanent home in Cardiff’s Morgan Quarter. Since then, the Emporium has grown into a thriving hub for queer culture and connection. From standout events like Howl! in the Arcades (an LGBTQI+ comedy night) and Draglings (a platform for emerging talent), to inclusive gatherings such as Transition, which centres trans and non-binary voices, the space offers a wide range of community-focused programming. Their community series featuring free or low-cost events like craft circles, queer play readings, and speed friendshipping, underscores their mission to foster safe, joyful, and accessible spaces for all.

JACK ARTS partnered with The Queer Emporium this Pride Month to shine a light on the people behind the Emporium, those who have built a safe, vibrant space for the LGBTQI+ community in Cardiff and beyond.

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The Glasgow-born artist, Trackie McLeod, is talking about the white-walled galleries, the institutions and the funding bodies that claim to champion diversity, but can more often come across as being tokenistic.

Proudly Scottish, Queer and working class, his work dances on the intersection of all of the above, taking the shape of sculptures, print, sound and more. From Burberry-clad Micras to copper-clad tabloid homophobia, his work merges sarcasm with sincerity to challenge who gets represented and who gets the piss taken out of them.

Fruit II marks his third solo show, this time taking place at The Bomb Factory’s Holborn Gallery in London (May 22 – June 11, 2025). Rooted in early 2000s reference points and his own battles of masculine versus femme energy, it’s a personal and political act of archiving: of what was repressed, what was performed, and what’s finally being reclaimed.

“It’s about growing up queer in Glasgow, and the kind of shame that came with that,” he says. “The performances, the silence, the things you did to fit in. I’ve tried to capture those unspoken rites of passage, the uniforms, the rituals, but also to take the piss out of them, because that’s how I process it. I want people to feel the heaviness if they need to, but also to laugh and to see themselves in it.”

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Every summer, for the last decade, GALA festival has turned a south London park into a three-day celebration of independence, community and underground spirit – drawing from a deep well of dance music histories. Initially a one-dayer in Brixton’s Brockwell Park, it’s since been taking place across three days on the last weekend of May on Peckham Rye.

The GALA origin story begins, though, in Newcastle. Co-founder Jonny Edwards was running a student night business and Giles Napier took a job flyering for him. Graduating to running club night Zap, for 1,500 electronic music loving students sealed the deal. ‘I fell in love with putting on those nights,’ he says, ‘seeing them do well, seeing the dancefloor light up. That’s where it started.’

Since the beginning, their festivals – they also run Rally in Southwark Park – have done more than just provide for the music lovers on the dancefloor. Over the last ten years they’ve ensured that local residents get discounted tickets; worked with community arts partners including Peckham Platforms and South London Gallery; and have raised over £40,000 for Southwark Day Centre for Asylum Seekers. ‘We want to contribute to a better landscape,’ says Giles, ‘not just setting up shop for three days. We want to be embedded, and to have a positive impact in the place we call home.’

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Michelle Hunter, Director of Programmes and Operations and the Designated Safeguard Lead at AudioActive cut her teeth in the music industry by way of the world-renowned Ministry of Sound in the early noughties. Michelle’s own story began trying to sleep with the sound of next door neighbour blues parties, a bassline that soundtracked her childhood and followed her to the parties she went to put on herself later in life. “Those blues parties were my first understanding of community and music coming together,” she shares, “it was always about belonging”. That feeling of a neighbourhood coming together to shake legs on a make-do domestic dancefloor extended into a life-long love affair with music and community, two facets of Michelle’s practice that continue to travel in parallel.

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It’s a hard time for all forms of collective, communal celebration, whether that’s physical venues struggling with rising costs, issues with property developers and noise-averse neighbours or almost everyone dealing with the spiralling cost of basics. However, good times will be had, and festivals provide an annual celebration, whether that’s something free and local, or big ticket moments like Glastonbury where audiences and artists alike can switch off and tune into their favourite forms of music and culture.

“Festivals and club culture, they provide a common ground for people,” says photographer Rob Jones, who has been creating iconic images of the dancefloor since 2015. “Everyone’s there for the same reason: the music and the emotion that comes with it. It’s so positive.”

During the pandemic, the photographer and co-founder of Khroma Collective with Jake Davis, photographed over 40 of London’s most iconic nightclubs and venues whilst they were closed. Shot at night, the images provide a time capsule both of a shared moment when going out wasn’t possible and of music venues in the capital city at that time.

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Creativity and community sit happily side by side. Bobby was instrumental in the rise of hip hop and production duo Frankie Stew and Harvey Gunn (100 million+ streams) as well as 2024 rising star RUBII. He launched The New Society Radio back in 2018 and was a senior producer on Brighton’s first youth-led Breakfast Show ‘The Rising’ which ran on Platform B during the pandemic. Before that, he created his streetwear brand and YouTube channel Tésty, came up alongside Rizzle Kicks in their earliest days, and collaborated with Chase & Status and Jordan Rakei through his early work with Elli Ingram.

Back in 2017 the two aspects became explicitly interlinked when Bobby met grime’s primo public intellectual, Elijah, off the train at Brighton Station. The latter had been offered a role as Associate Artistic Director of Lighthouse, later becoming known outside UK music for his ground-breaking Yellow Squares – themselves appearing on BUILDHOLLYWOOD billboards in 2023.

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“Brazil is home to the largest Japanese population outside of Japan”, shares Fernanda Liberti, one of the artists featured in the BUILDHOLLYWOOD collaboration, “ it has the biggest African population outside of Africa, with more Lebanese people living in Brazil than there are Lebanese people in Lebanon”. Her own Syrian and Brazilian heritage speaks to the rich cultural complexity of Brazilian migration, with artist Gustavo sharing his own anthropological understanding of the very human history of migration. “Nations are built because of people that come and go”, he says, with his project in collaboration with artist JC Candanedo exploring the diasporic identity found in the Brazilian delivery driver population in the UK. “We can’t live without these people”, JC shares, “they have completely changed the way we live”.

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The last time we crossed paths IRL was at the social enterprise and charity – now sadly closed – House of Saint Barnabas in Soho. Titchner’s show there – titled PAINTINGS WITH WORDS AND PAINTINGS WITH WORDS AND NUMBERS – was an exhibition of exquisite economy. At another extreme, and just to begin to demonstrate the breadth of the artist’s production, Titchner was invited to make work for an ambitious and conscience raising partnership between Hauser & Wirth and mental health changemaking charity Hospital Rooms. LIKE THERE IS HOPE AND I CAN DREAM OF ANOTHER WORLD is a 15m long, almost 6m high mural hand painted on fifty-one plywood panels that has been shown in different venues but is destined to be permanently installed at The River Centre, a new NHS mental health hospital in Norwich. This is an artist whose creative output continually surprises, challenges and with this latest poster work conceivably nurtures passersby. Having collaborated with Mark back in 2020 to display PLEASE BELIEVE THESES DAYS WILL PASS during the pandemic, it’s a pleasure and privilege for BUILDHOLLYWOOD to share Titchner’s work once again, featuring IT’S THE HOPE THAT KEEPS US HERE throughout the UK.

An overarching subject would seem to be addressing and reflecting on the human condition. The range and depth of his work seems to offer up a kind of test laboratory, both proposing and wondering how we communicate, receive and deal with different facets of life’s complexity. In short, it’s a mission to investigate how we think, feel, behave and care for one another. The artist kindly agreed to answer a few questions to explore his creative process in a bit more depth.

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The most striking and recognisable element of Sgàire’s work is her signature doll-eye make-up: a hyperreal, hyper-feminine anime-esque look that speaks to the origin of glamour as a form of magical trickery. Equally alluring and disquieting, Sgàire transforms the make-up routine from a process of enhancement to an optical illusion in an accentuated take on the (specifically trans and queer) creation of identity. In 2020, she revealed the secrets behind her look via a make-up tutorial video for Vogue. In many ways the video could be considered her ultimate artwork, and the epitome of camp magnificence; a perfectly balanced critique/celebration of image-making on arguably its most storied platform.

Sgàire’s work is often situated in nightlife spaces, and there’s something of the ‘80s club kid in the way she melds avant-garde and pop references in these environments – much like her friends and frequent collaborators PONYBOY. She’s performed at clubs, Pride events and gallery parties throughout Europe, and she co-founded the much-missed Glasgow queer club Bonjour, where she hosted the legendary karaoke night Sgàiraoke. She has continued to develop this karaoke/performance art hybrid in venues around Scotland, including at Edinburgh Art Festival and Jupiter Artland’s annual queer party JUPITER RISING – this year she hosted dressed in an XXXXXL heavy metal longsleeve t-shirt, the arms dragging behind her like a bizarre bridal veil.

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There’s something more to Old Spitalfields Market than the scores of people browsing table tops and shops through daylight hours; there’s a resounding echo of the East London rag trade, and a history that weaves its way through South Asian migration and localised craft. Glance up to the rafters this autumn and you might catch a glimpse of “Bidrohi”, a resplendent collection of work from three remarkably talented British Bangladeshi and Bengali artists, namely; Ace Rahman, a multi-hyphenate walking the tightrope between digital and traditional practices, Mohammed Z Rahman, visual artist and writer exploring the socio-political through dreamscapes and the domestic, and Puer Deorum, interdisciplinary artist and curator navigating radical imagination, polychronic experiences, and non-linear realities through their practices of performance, photography, and set design (to name a few).

“Bidrohi” as a collection speaks to the legacy of migration, something that Mohammed has explored throughout his catalogue of work; “I feel like stasis is not the norm – there has always been movement of people,” he shares earnestly, “I think I’m trying to normalise, or validate this kind of creolised identity of Bangladeshis in Europe, and their wider histories and interactions with other diasporas”. This feeling of liminality and difference is critically articulated through each artist’s work, with a candid mix of street photography, self-portraits, and domestic scenes caught in paint each depicting a shared but unique interpretation of South Asian migration, by way of the East end.

When asked what “Bidrohi” means and the significance of this choice for the collection, Ace shares that the title references a poem by Kazi Nazrul Islam, a well-known Bangladeshi revolutionary poet that the three artists all felt connected to. “I personally feel that the poem and what it stands for is the essence of what it means to be a contemporary queer Bangladeshi artist in the modern age”, Ace shares, “it’s about standing up for your people and your land, and for what’s right”, something that each of the artists commit to unwaveringly.

Another organisation that has found their home in the East End by way of South Asia is Oitij-jo – “they’re a foundational hub that really supports this movement of British Bangladeshi artists”, Mohammed shares, a space which Ace also occupied during their first artists residency which, coincidentally, was facilitated and curated by Puer. Despite their distinct practices, the three artists appear to share a commonality beyond their respective canvases, speaking of each other’s work with fondness and interest, and demonstrating the importance of kinship in collaboration, as well as in ancestry.

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BUILDHOLLYWOOD’s one-of-a-kind cultural venue is now home to an architect’s dream, a dynamic space dressed and designed to respond to Beyond the Box’s brief of “Expressions of Resilience”. The three young architects who won the design competition have dismantled the very bones of the proverbial box and rebuilt it to reflect their lofty architectural ambitions, bringing resilience head-to-head with rest in the belly of an incongruous 1 Quaker street.

The space is an ode to resilience, solidarity, and creative expression, with Taja, Lily, and Akif’s work taking inspiration from the East End roots that they find themselves creating in. All hailing from the area, the designers have worked with Beyond the Box and BUILDHOLLYWOOD to create an environment built for the vast array of people who will experience it. Informed by neurodivergence and the profound impact of protest in the face of global atrocities, the space is a lyrical ode to people-powered resilience, the importance of honouring difference, and the vital need to design beyond the automatic archetype.

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Living with his parents and four siblings in a close-knit family environment, Ilori developed a deep appreciation for togetherness, a value that continues to resonate in his projects. “Affirmation is one of the biggest things we were introduced to when we were young,” Ilori explains. This foundation of positive reinforcement, along with his parents’ emphasis on self-contentment and cultural pride, has profoundly shaped his design philosophy. His work celebrates his dual heritage and the joy of belonging, offering audiences a visual language that bridges cultural and emotional experiences. 

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On August 25th, the legendary band transformed their hometown into a large-scale canvas for climate action with Act 1.5—a pioneering, low-carbon event that aimed to set a new standard for how festivals and gigs could operate in a world facing ecological collapse. Like anything capable of creating worthwhile change, the festival—and its art installations—did not come without challenges, be they financial or logistical.

Integral to the event’s success was Kaye Dunnings, Creative Director of Glastonbury’s radical Shangri-La field, who brought her expertise in merging art and activism to the forefront. Her involvement went beyond curating a visual spectacle; she helped shape Act 1.5 into a climate rallying cry – using the streets of Bristol as a platform for celebrating activists, and a large-scale gallery of politically charged works at the event by artists like Kennard Phillipps, Darren Cullen, and Ella Baron. Working alongside Massive Attack and BUILDHOLLYWOOD, the team’s collaborative vision aimed to deliver a message as bold as it was necessary.

“There’s a history of street art in Bristol,” Kaye explains. “It’s part of the fabric of Bristol, and it’s always been political. It felt right to bring that energy into this event because that’s what Act 1.5 is—political, urgent, and deeply connected to the city.” Through installations scattered across the city and the festival grounds, the project connected Bristol’s rich history of rebellious art with the urgency of climate activism.

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It’s something of an understatement to say that 2023 was a big year for Ezra Collective. Their unexpected win at the Mercury Prize generated not only the memorable and highly joyful image of a whole-band bundle when their name was declared but also an acceptance speech that placed their success in a community context, shouting out their youth club, Tomorrow’s Warriors, alongside friends and family. It was a very Ezra moment.

They’re topping off 2024 with the fruits of the past year’s labour – a third album written backstage and on tour buses and then recorded at the famous Abbey Road studios. Dance, No One’s Watching combines core Ezra ingredients of jazz and dub, hip hop, hi-life and salsa; worldwide dance music, Londonised. This is big welcoming dancefloor energy, with enough balm-songs to take you home afterwards – and to pick you up the next morning.

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We’d watch Derry Girls together and Trisha would be reminded of what it was like when she was growing up, with the presence of army officers everywhere. But they were young and kind of took the situation for granted, they’d not known any different. For the most part young people were busy focussing on their own lives. I mean, because she was living in a mainly Protestant area, she was somewhat shielded from the worst of it. But she did say there was a 9pm curfew, after which you weren’t allowed out. And huge metal gates were erected at the end of streets, they were locked at night so even if you went out you couldn’t go far.

It was when Trisha was making work later in the 1980s, after she’d left Northern Ireland to study for her Fine Art degree at Portsmouth that she began to reflect deeply on her childhood, what she and others experienced. The atmosphere of oppression, fear and constant surveillance by an occupying power.

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JACK ARTS Scotland partnered with Ponyboy to present a takeover at Glasgow Green showcasing stunning new portraits of some of their regular performers ahead of their latest Club Kid event, featuring: Babyjaii, Miss Cabbage, Dill, Huntress, Lourdes, Maya Jaye, Pixie Chanel and Zulaa – created by photographer Kate McMahon.

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Every so often a newer designer appears on the scene that garners a lot of attention, but sometimes the excitement is hard to sustain for a brand starting out. A few years ago designer Karoline Vitto presented her graduate collection and proved to be a name that would be glued to the lips of London’s fashion community for a long time. Four years since her brand was first launched, she is still a pioneering talent and setting a new standard for her generation. When we speak, she is kind, patient and has the sort of assertive energy you could expect from someone running a successful, tight ship.

Born in Brazil and currently based in London, Vitto’s journey into fashion was not typical of those around her in the Brazilian countryside town of Caçador. Surrounded by a family immersed in the craft –  her grandfather a cobbler and her grandmothers adept at sewing – Vitto’s early exposure to the hands-on creation of garments sparked her fascination with the art of making. Her childhood in the 90s, during a time when Brazilian fashion was dominated by unattainable beauty standards epitomized by models like those on Victoria’s Secret runways, led her to question the narrow definitions of beauty and to eventually carve out her own path in the industry.

Moving to London in 2016 to study at Central Saint Martins, Vitto sought a more creative approach to fashion education, a stark contrast to the technical focus she experienced in Brazil. Her time in London not only shaped her design philosophy but also solidified her commitment to creating garments that celebrate every body type. Vitto’s work is characterized by its focus on inclusivity and her dedication to representing real women – sampling on a size 16 or larger, and extending her sizes up to 4XL. For Vitto, designing for a variety of body types was never an afterthought; it was a fundamental aspect of her brand’s identity from the very beginning.

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A Continual Farewell is a classic story of romance, betrayal, tragedy and, of course, sex & drugs & rock & roll – all told through 13 years worth of beautifully crafted love letters.  At the heart of it, the man of letters himself was one of the great figures in the history of Mancunian music and British culture.  Anthony H (Tony) Wilson was a Granada TV personality, the presenter of iconic punk/post-punk music show So It Goes and one of the creators of Manchester’s most influential record label Factory – home to Joy Division, New Order, A Certain Ratio, Durutti Column and later Happy Mondays.  On the receiving end was “Lins”, Tony’s first wife Lindsay Reade, who he met in May 1976 just before his “epiphany” seeing the Sex Pistols at Manchester’s Lesser Free Trade Hall.

The letters tell the true story of their courtship, their stormy marriage, their divorce, their subsequent clandestine liaisons and their eventual reconciliation before Wilson’s early death at 57 in August 2007.  Along the way we’re given access to the private and romantically poetic thoughts of Anthony H as he tries to balance his television career with the rise of Joy Division, the suicide of Ian Curtis, the success of Factory Records through New Order and Factory’s culturally significant by-products, the Hacienda club and eventually Madchester.

During the course of their marriage which, by these accounts, was rocky and plagued with jealousy from the start, it becomes clear that Tony’s old-fashioned approach to their relationship fuels Lindsay’s insecurities.  All five directors of Factory Records were men even though Tony used his and Lindsay’s money to fund early releases, including Joy Division’s ‘Unknown Pleasures’: “Tony and I never had children but we did give birth to Factory”.  In her commentary, Lindsay writes that “as Tony’s lover I felt like a goddess but as his wife, a doormat”.  Later in the marriage she says she’d “continued to be a household slave which was utterly unappreciated by him”.  And her jealousy takes hold when Blondie make their TV debut on Granada Reports  in November 1977 performing ‘Rip Her To Shreds’.  Lindsay writes of Debbie Harry “she was the most beautiful creature, super talented and Tony clearly worshipped her”.

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Displayed across billboards throughout London, Birmingham, Manchester & Bristol, the campaign juxtaposes said bias with positive portrayals of Black girlhood that highlight the innocence and vulnerability Black girls are usually not afforded and the widespread misrepresentation of Black girls within the media. The campaign enlisted Black British female photographers Aicha Thomas and Jade Reynolds-Hemmings to transform the perception of Black British girlhood through visual storytelling.

Creators Eboni Lamine and Martha Omasoro commented on the project, saying: “Adultification Bias occurs when adults perceive children from ethnic minority backgrounds as being older or more mature than they are. It is a systemic issue that is unfortunately an inherent part of the Black British and global experiences. With Let Black Girls Be Girls, our goal is to create a campaign that educates society on the deep-rooted impact of Adultification Bias on Black girls and afford every Black girl the innocence and vulnerability of childhood, not marred by race”.

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For five decades, Camden Market has represented creativity, subculture and rebellion in London. Now a complex network of interconnecting markets, Camden Market started life as a temporary, weekly arts and crafts fair behind iconic music venue Dingwalls in 1974. Today, it’s the largest market in London, open all year round and drawing in 250,000 visitors a week.

Camden Market has always been intertwined with the music culture of the area. With venues like The Electric Ballroom, The Underworld, the Roundhouse and The Dublin Castle in the vicinity, over the decades the market grew with the local music scenes. Fashion influenced music and vice versa, with the clothes on sale at the market representing the alternative spirit of Camden.

To celebrate 50 years of the iconic space, Camden Market partnered with BUILDHOLLYWOOD on a one-of-a-kind mural to showcase its vibrant past, present and future. BUILDHOLLYWOOD curated the artists and produced the project from start to finish, they also created artwork for billboards currently dotted around Camden. Inspired by the five colourful decades of the market, tracing its humble beginnings through its music-filled history to the tourist destination it is today.

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Walthamstow FC has become a template for talented young players, attracting unrivalled coaching offering in a nurturing environment. Buildhollywood have partnered with the team in sponsorship, aiming to inspire further success.

Figurehead John Sullivan is an ardent coach with a legacy of both success and developing talent. His unwavering commitment and personal sacrifices have laid the foundation of an environment where kids flourish. Working alongside him are a team of Academy coaches at the height of their craft, including some from Premiership teams which brings professionalism to the team. The coaching team is now further complemented by the presence of Jérémie Aliadière, an ex-Arsenal player and member of the legendary 2004 Arsenal Invincibles team.

In our conversation with Sullivan, Aliadière, and a selection of the team’s players, we spoke candidly about their involvement with the team and its personal impact on their journeys. Particularly notable were the players’ accounts, offering insights into their footballing paths, from their initial steps in the sport to the deep bonds forged within the Walthamstow family. Their stories echo the ethos of unity, development and kinship that defines Walthamstow FC.

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A top ten of Jeremy Deller posters might include the rave-era benevolence of ‘Bless This Acid House’, his Brexit-era ‘Welcome To The Shitshow’ (printed on a Union Jack), and a poster showing Stonehenge as if the monoliths were actually spelling out the word ‘vote’.

The 2024 General Election campaign sees two new Deller artworks hitting the streets, in collaboration with BUILDHOLLYWOOD. One states quite accurately ‘We Have Been Swimming In Shit’ with the other bearing the legend ‘14 Years Of Hurt’ (designed by Fraser Muggeridge). Posted up around the UK, they are he says, ‘self-explanatory’. ‘When you’re making a poster in the street you have to make it attention-grabbing, something easily and quickly legible, ’he says, adding that these two additions to the political poster archives are ‘insanely legible’.

The Euros influenced one of the posters. ‘Because the football’s on, I thought I’d wrestle it in. The design looks like the back of a football shirt, not that I’m a football fan. It’s obvious, maybe it’s too obvious, but everyone knows what it means, and what the 14 years refers to. It doesn’t need explaining’.

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Monumental and expressive, the painterly portrait by Case Maclaim (aka Andreas Chrzanowski); Cbloxx (aka Jay Gilleard) created their signature aerosol magic and mystery; HERA (Jasmin Siddiqui) delivered a truly towering artwork that nevertheless communicates care and tenderness; KMG’s bold, beautifully pared-down characters at the airport transformed non-descript buildings into visual clarions; Mahn Kloix introduced another of his ‘contre-feux’ figures that seek to give a voice to whistle-blowers, refugees, activists and the like; Millo (Francesco Camillo Giorgino) combined breath-taking detail, urban energy and subtle allusions to myriad hidden stories; Neil “Shoe” Meulman brought his distinctive ‘calligraffiti’ to the festival; Wasted Rita’s faux street signage seeded the city with poetic, wistfully critical comments and artist and muralist Molly Hankinson had the singular honour of marshalling Aberdonian ‘kids’ (aged 9 to 99) in making the mother of all chalk floor drawings.

Such are the new visual delights and provocations added to the ever-changing Nuart trail of public works. Weekly tours of the art continue throughout the summer months but as the curtains came down on Nuart Festival’s core weekend of films, lectures, presentations and panel discussions, it seemed a good idea to catch up with Nuart Festival founder and director Martyn Reed and Nuart Plus co-convenor and Nuart Journal editor Susan Hansen.

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Its distance covered grows for a few weeks every year or so, depending on whether or not a team bearing Three Lions upon chests is participating in the latest major football tournament. This summer, as Gareth Southgate leads another squad of players to another major finals at Euro 2024, you can safely predict an increase in expected flags – and not just because patriotism-slash-nationalism tends to get turned up a notch.

Sheffield-born artist Corbin Shaw has been using England flags as his canvas for a while now, and with the help of BUILDHOLLYWOOD’s Your Space Or Mine project and their billboards, his take on St George’s Cross will adorn city streets up and down the nation.

Its use is not about reclaiming the flag, but rather using it as a “Trojan Horse” to deliver messages about national identity and masculinity. “It’s quite abrasive,” he says, chatting to us during a trip to Marseilles – a city that felt the sharp end of this cross during the World Cup in 1998. “It’s got a lot of history in colonialism and right-wing nationalism and I wanted to use it, overt that and juxtapose it.”

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Across the following four years anam and its network have grown, developing opportunities and projects for emerging musicians and artists – including collaborations inspired by the Scottish environment, multi-artform events presenting music, dance performances and live interactive visuals and limited-edition artist commissions for their online shop.

As striking imagery from their previous projects rolled out across our Glasgow sites, we caught up with directors Michiel Turner, Ben Deans and Brèagha Charlton to find out more about anam creative, their championing of emerging Glasgow-based artists and their advice for early-career creatives looking to explore ideas.

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With Arthur the dog sitting just out of shot beside her, Katharine Hamnett appears as if out of nowhere on the screen, captured in a bright room with a lit cigarette in one hand, periodically shifting in position to accommodate the sleeping hound to her left. “He has a dog pass, you see”, she shares, “so he can come everywhere with me, even to the Tate”. This kind of loyal company feels reminiscent of Katharine’s unwavering commitment to justice, her dogged determination for seeing things through properly, and her persistent hounding of political heavyweights to listen to the people, and to act accordingly. 

It’s clear to all that Katharine Hamnett has a remarkable number of accolades to her name; from winning the first ever British Fashion Awards to renouncing her CBE on account of the Palestine crisis, her accomplishments appear to align wholeheartedly with her strong moral compass. A recent post on her instagram shows Katharine dressed in a black T-shirt with the words “DISGUSTED TO BE BRITISH” proudly emblazoned on the front, capturing her speaking a few words to camera before swiftly binning her CBE. “I’m not the only one disgusted to be British, apparently”, she comments when we discuss it in our interview. “We sold a tonne of those T-shirts”. 

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On the edge of Liverpool’s Georgian Quarter, once an affluent neighbourhood of grand townhouses and gardens inhabited by the city’s prosperous Victorian merchants and traders, lies Concert Square – now a hedonistic playground of bars, djs, live music, karaoke, students, football fans, stags and hens… everything can be found here, and anything goes. The drinking, the dancing, and the dressing up. Some make it a weekly affair, some avoid it completely, some simply pass through on their way home; running a gauntlet of debauched revellers passing from bar to club to chippy and back again.  

There to capture scenes from this Scouse ‘bacchanalia’ is John Johnson, who has been photographing countless lost nights in Concert Square and its surrounding streets for over a decade. 

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Known as Bobby and Bobbie respectively, Bob Vylan are a duo renowned for their brazen lyrics and commitment to music with meaning, building an identity reminiscent of a genre yet created or credited for its hold on the ears of the masses. BUILDHOLLYWOOD spoke with guitarist and singer Bobby to learn more about the politics of being political, their 2022 MOBO Award win, and the magic of their upcoming album, Humble As The Sun.

Bob Vylan’s sound is uniquely compelling, aligning the rage of punk with the poetry of grime to generate music fuelled by both the weight of lived experience and the hook of driving guitar riffs. There’s a measure to their lyrics; an outpouring of discourse tempered by what can only be described as a pretty reasonable assessment of the political situation we find ourselves in. “It’s confrontational”, Bobby shares in our conversation, a word that captures the vim and vigour found in tracks like “I Heard You Want Your Country Back” and “England’s Ending”, and yet Bobby is anything but confrontational, instead, he’s an artist generous with his thoughts and musings; be it on fatherhood, the state of foreign policy, or the blissful warmth of the sun.

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Beginning in the 1980s, its founding members, who go by the aliases Frida Kahlo and Käthe Kollwitz after the great women artists, have produced spectacular posters that confront the shortcomings of some of the biggest museums in the world. In 1989, their screenprint of Do Women Have to Be Naked to Get Into the Met. Museum?, which featured a painting by Jean-Auguste-Dominique modified with a gorilla mask, stated with staggering clarity the state of the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s modern art collection, where ‘less than 5% of the artists in the Modern Art Sections are women, but 85% of the nudes are female’. Other posters recounted, with the Guerrilla Girls’ trademark satirical bite, the abysmal collections of commercial galleries in New York that primarily represented white male artists.

Their influence on the contemporary art world is immeasurable, and many art enthusiasts go so far as to call them ‘art world royalty’. A term that is perhaps too antiquated for the Guerrilla Girls’ taste, whose goal has always been to democratise art, away from billionaires and museums who concertise ideas of taste and quality based on their private collections. Their anonymity, which began as a safety measure to protect their members from the vitriol of the art world, is now their superpower, shares Frida. “I think our anonymity intrigues people and draws them in. As we are artists, the masks also ensure that our message and politics aren’t obscured by what people think of our personalities and our art.”

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A conversation with Becky Tong, the maestro behind foundation.fm Records, and Alice Vyvyan-Jones, the orchestrator of the airwaves as Station Manager, opens up the vibrant composition that is foundation.fm. Born out of necessity, this radio station is not merely a broadcaster but a built-up platform for underrepresented, non-binary, queer, and female talent in music.

Rooted in Peckham and now flourishing in the revered Young Space in Haggerston, f.fm has become a testament to the power of community – the real kind, not the buzzword. The sense of belonging is encapsulated in the unofficial motto, “When people leave foundation.fm, they never truly leave.”

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With a bunch of yellow daffodils sat obliquely in the corner of the screen, Dagmar Bennett’s Welsh identity extends well beyond her gentle accent and clear pride in her ancestry – she is at once an emblem of her country and a strident observer, having carefully documented her family in a recent BBC documentary aptly titled Village Style. Hailing from the very same rural village in south west Wales, Dagmar advocates for creativity borne from the Celtic nations; “an identity”, she says, “that sits a little different to a British or English identity”, as a country with its own native language, rich history, and vibrant future.

Having studied a technical arts degree funded by Madame Tussauds at UAL, Dagmar began her film career by exploring figurative sculpture and life drawing with clay, creating a physical legacy for artists and activists challenging narratives and stigmas in human difference. Dagmar’s early sculpture work led her to Adam Pearson, an actor, presenter, and campaigner with a keen interest in how we can tackle disability hate crime as someone with Neurofibromatosis Type 1, a genetic condition that causes excess body tissue to grow predominately on his face. Adam and Dagmar struck up a fond friendship, and went on to collaborate on a sculpture of Adam’s face that uses art as a medium of capturing his identity beyond disfigurement.

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The first piece of work, created by a group known as Hiber Nature (Sihan Cai, Noam Dee, Elena Inoue, Ametx Meneses Gonzalez), pulled together photos of green spaces–scans of hands grasping ivy, a bare tree alone in the woods–along with nature-themed poetry. Designed as a way of bringing light into the dark days, the project is a powerful reminder that there is green to be found, even in East London. The poem centres on the idea that, even as the leaves disappear, green ivy remains.

Sitting alongside it is a project by Butt Srsly (April Paice, Finley Gilzene, Alfie Barnes, Jenna Rubenstein, Millie Ghey), a group that formed at LCC and now wants to proceed as a serious collective. “This was the first time we worked in a group setting creating something together, which was the coolest part of this process,” they tell us. Like Hiber Nature, Butt Srsly’s work is more than photography, combining disciplines to convey their messaging. While photography is central to their project, they are also influenced by textiles, fashion, metalwork, and other elements. For this piece, they created a wearable sculpture of balloons, making the body look hypnotic and grotesque. “We had Fin photographed wearing the sculpture, but the images itself were its own separate thing alongside the performance element. We combined elements together that created a whole piece,” they tell us.

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Philip had been working with Kate Taylor on a temp job with the British Council, so they decided to start the festival together. They put on a four day festival, utilising his burgeoning connections with filmmakers and accepting submissions via VHS. They put on bands and other events alongside the screenings, and after a few years, it was enough of a success to change their name to London Film Festival and expand to venues like the Soho Curzon cinema. Now in its 21st year, the festival is Philip’s full-time job.

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From giving instant support on the ground to providing long-term educational programmes, their work and its impact can be seen and felt in the likes of Gaza, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Ukraine, Bosnia, and anywhere in the world where conflict breaks out. Free from states and governments, they are driven by a single goal – a safe future for every child living through war.

Those familiar with their work, or perhaps their name at least, might not recall where they heard first the name ‘War Child.’ For the Head of War Child Records Rich Clarke, it was as a teenager, listening to his beloved Radiohead – one of many household names to donate music and more to the War Child cause via the historic compilation album Help.

‘Music has always been ingrained in the DNA of the organisation,’ says Rich, whose job description sits on the unique cross-section of the music industry and humanitariansim. From the big stage of Royal Albert Hall to the use of music as psycho-social support for children dealing with trauma, the remit of War Child and it’s record label is almost as big as its impact.

A collaboration with BUILDHOLLYWOOD will see War Child continue to effectively spread their important message across posters and billboards across the country – a message that has always been shared by whatever means necessary.

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We’re always keen to showcase artists’ voices and spread important messages, so we were excited to get the chance to collaborate with Tate Britain on a mural to celebrate their new exhibition. The exhibition, Women in Revolt! Art and Activism in the UK 1970-1990, will be on display from November 2023 until April 2024. Featuring over 100 women artists, the exhibition is the first of its kind, bringing together a wide variety of mediums including painting, drawing, sculpture, performance, film and photography. 

According to Tate, the exhibition “explores and reflects on issues and events such as: the British Women’s Liberation movement, the fight for legal changes impacting women, maternal and domestic experiences, Punk and independent music, Greenham Common and the peace movement, the visibility of Black and South Asian Women Artists, Section 28 and the AIDs pandemic.” There is a diverse range of artists featured, many of whom have been left out of the traditional art world and have never been shown in this setting before. 

To celebrate this landmark exhibition, we partnered with Tate on a public mural in the heart of Camden. We sourced the space and commissioned the artists including Hannah Dickins, also known as Disco Dickins, to design the Camden mural, working with five emerging London-based artists to develop a collection of protest placards painted under the arches. The works, by Anka Dabrowska, Alice Hartley, Esme Lower, Zhou Ning and Olivia Twist join protest slogans supporting women’s rights taken from archival material in the exhibition. Responding to themes like protest, power, LGBTQ+ activism and women’s rights, the mural is a powerful distillation of the exhibition.

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2023 marks the third edition of The Photographers’ Gallery New Talent (TNT) programme, where six photographers are awarded with an online exhibition platform for their project, a mentor each and a grant to support their artistic pursuits. JACK ARTS have partnered with TPG to provide further support and exposure for these artists by displaying work from their projects on a series of billboards across London.

This year’s winners are Igor Chekachkov, Weiyi (Margaret) Liang, Cynthia MaiWa Sitei, Cian Oba-Smith, Robbie Spotswood and Ruudu Ulas. Following an open call, they were chosen by artist Hoda Afshar and Karen McQuaid, senior curator of The Photographers’ Gallery.

What unites their work is subject conviction; sharing a strong visual language, coherent concepts and powerful themes. The notion of identity and experience – whether it be the individual’s own, reflecting on the identities of others, or a shared identity – is showcased brilliantly throughout the projects.

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“I texted a mate when I saw them and said – and this sounds ridiculous – it feels like being a pop star. Something you’ve done has been plastered all over the walls. I never thought I’d experience that,” says Turner, who has worked for the band as a writer and press officer on and off for the last 30 years. “I’m always one step removed. I see posters for bands I work with. I see a Chemical Brother’s poster and I feel proud because I’m part of it, but the book – it’s weird. It’s a very warm feeling.”

Paused in Cosmic Reflection positions the band as the centre of a hyper-visual world. Turner went into the Chemical Brothers’ archive in their south coast studio to select iconic images, flyers and posters, and there’s a bespoke cover designed by their long-term artist Kate Gibb. Design duties went to filmmaker and visual artist Paul Kelly (Finisterre and This Is Tomorrow). It had been out for less than a fortnight when Rough Trade Books named it #3 in their top books of the year after Jeremy Deller’s Art Is Magic and Thurston Moore’s Sonic Life memoir.

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It’s an invitation to find out more about a new community-generated cultural space. And beneath the artwork is a powerful story of making space and dreaming big, which led earlier this year to not-for-profit co-operative Sister Midnight acquiring a ten-year rent-free lease on The Brookdale Club, a disused Working Mens Club in Catford, in the London borough of Lewisham. It will be the first community-owned music venue in the area and it is led by three women under 30 years old: co-founders Lenny Watson and Sophie Farrell, and musician Lottie Pendlebury of Goat Girl.

The plan is to turn the currently derelict building and private yard into a 300-capacity venue, a community lab, a bar, workspace and kitchen with upstairs studios. Whilst all of the above is dependent on planning permission, one aspect is already in the world – Sister Midnight FM broadcasting under the tagline ‘from Catford to the world’.

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It’s a difficult time to be a recent graduate, particularly in the fashion industry. Along with all of the other financial and social challenges, students have had to deal with the effects of the pandemic on their studies. Many lost a full year of socialising and face-to-face education, and are having to find innovative ways to make up for lost time. Even without that extra hurdle, finding support and work opportunities in an industry so often reliant on contacts and clout can be tough for artists and designers. Curtain Road Collective is one group’s answer to those problems. Formed of nine recent graduates who met on their fashion course, Curtain Road Collective gives those emerging designers room to play without the structures of a traditional fashion house.

The designers all have different skills that they bring to the collective, and the way it works allows them all to have different jobs and come and go as they please. It offers a way for them to get support from one another while still being able to work independently. In their final year, when they had to present their collections, they knew that they wanted to do something unusual that reflected their avant garde pieces. BUILDHOLLYWOOD wanted to help, so they stepped in to offer their brand new event space,The CarWash in Shoreditch, giving Curtain Road Collective full access to the space, letting them exercise their creativity and showcase their unique, imperfect pieces. As part of this exciting partnership, BUILDHOLLYWOOD also provided posters that wrapped around the space to promote the show.

We chatted to Benjamin Ingham, Rosie Chesters, and Mariam Parra of Curtain Road Collective about their history, the show, and what’s next for such a talented group of young designers at the start of their careers.

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It’s been a busy few years for the artist and director. As well as performances at dance mecca Sadler’s Wells and London’s experimental hub Cafe OTO, Magnus has scored the soundtrack for Paolo Carzana’s runway at London Fashion Week and performed for Louis Vuitton.

Right now, Magnus Westwell is inside, awaiting the start of the performance. Their Company, Bright Storm Group, is made up of trained and untrained dancers and tonight they’ll premier this 20-minute piece which takes clubs and raves as its inspiration. It twists, deconstructs and amplifies the kind of moves you might see under dancefloor strobe lights into something wholly new.

“It feels powerful, in the individual rhythms of each person’s performance,” says Westwell. “It’s very musical and rhythmical. Repetition, loops, and what that can do. It feels like a deconstruction of music and dance. The artists never really face the audience.”

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Mollie Balshaw and Rebekah Beasley established Short Supply shortly after graduating in 2019, aiming to support artists who feel a lack of support and community after leaving art school. Since then, the organisation has gone from strength to strength, collaborating with Islington Mill, SOUP, Manchester Pride, Manchester Art Gallery, the Institute of International Visual Arts and the Whitworth Gallery among others, all while battling a global pandemic, a cost-of-living crisis, and the ongoing precarity around arts funding in the UK.

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Through the sheer amount of ways to interact with Blind at The Age of Four – the album, the paintings, the performances, the exhibition, the billboards – you can learn a lot about the beauty of life’s abstraction, the importance of making art and culture accessible, the artist in question’s childhood and, maybe even your own experiences. 

Growing up in an area of Cambridgeshire he describes as ‘the middle of nowhere,’ Jack Warne’s childhood is timestamped by spells of blindness. Caused by a rare, hereditary disease called Thiel–Behnke dystrophy, his experience of the condition, and the way he interprets the world as a result of it, is as integral to the all-encompassing project as the name would suggest. 

Blind at The Age of Four is the debut album from the producer and fine artist, but it’s more so a world that he’s been building since he moved to London. GAUNT not only creates crunchy, electronic textures in music, he also puts them into a painted, full collection of warping, physical and digital art that will be exhibited at 39 Gransden Avenue in Hackney throughout September and October.

Header video by Jack Warne

The post How going ‘Blind at The Age of Four’ inspired musician and fine artist GAUNT’s debut album and exhibition. first appeared on BUILDHOLLYWOOD.

“We’ve been at We Out Here since the start and what really stands out is the community feel and the family values says Don’t Be A Creep (DBAC) co-conspirator Maude Churchill. “We used that as a way of diving into the issues.” 

The issues are ones that relate to safer spaces – concepts which were front and centre of this year’s festival season and which are flowing into club culture more generally as the nights draw in and evenings out becomes more venue-centred.  

“It’s house rules!” says DJ, art director and DBAC founder Ruby Savage. “Like at home when there was a pen and pad in the kitchen with your mum’s notes on it – do this, do that, do the dishes by the time I’m home. It’s that idea. We run a household together, we run this space together, we’re a family.”

Header photo by Hannah Burton

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In the early 1990s Slowdive reigned supreme. Their sonic trademark of glow-drenched, reverb-soaked guitars created huge emotional worlds, inhabited by fans worldwide. The five-piece split in 1995 after three critically-acclaimed albums on the iconic Creation Records – and reformed in 2017 with the epic Slowdive.

Their fifth album, everything is alive, began with vocalist and guitarist Neil Halstead playing around with modular synths in his Cornish home. “That was the direction he started in,” says bassist Nick Chaplin, “but unfortunately for him, when everyone else gets in the room it all tends to go back to the more regular Slowdive Sounds. There’s a bit of an influence of both. I think it’s turned out pretty well.”

It’s an understated perspective on the big sounds that Slowdive deal in. It’s evocative music, full of late night tenderness and strung-out early morning atmospherics. The sound, says Chaplin, goes right back to their earliest recordings. “Back in 1989 we were influenced by people like The Primitives and Jesus and the Mary Chain: short pop songs and noisy guitars. Rachel and I were goths when we were teenagers, so we had that atmospheric side to the music we liked to listen to. When we came up with ‘Avalyn’ – the almost instrumental track on the first EP – we all looked at each other in the studio and said ‘OK, this is not The Primitives anymore’.”

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The theme of artist and furniture designer Rio Kobayashi’s upcoming show is Conviviality: ‘the art of living together’. While it’s his first “solo” show, it’s actually a big, unique collaboration with some of his closest friends and greatest inspirations – among them, Flavia Brändle, Peter Pilotto, Walde Seife, James Hague, Keita Takemura, Åbäke and more. The show will be part of this year’s Brompton Design District at Cromwell Place, and Kobayashi will be showing some of his fun designs, including new work. He’s known for pieces that play with the possibilities and boundaries of furniture – a table shaped like a fish, shelving with a face, and Japanese-inspired screens among them.

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Inspired by the work ethic of his grandfather, the wit of his mother and, above all, the migrant experience of growing up in the United Kingdom, the project harnesses South Asian drums, Dancehall rhythms and a collaborative spirit that can be found in Balraj Samrai’s work across all of the above.

Thanks to our Your Space Or Mine series, the name of the project will be up on billboards all over the city that was so important to its creation.

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He started training in Bristol and then when the pandemic hit decided to bring ballroom to Wales. He and co-director Tayo Sanwo have built a thriving collective with support from The Impeccable Haus of Tisci, who have appeared on HBO’s Legendary TV show. “It’s amazing how something can be birthed during such a crazy time,” he says as we celebrate WBC as part of Pride Month. “Now we’re really thriving. There’s a beautiful Welsh scene and we’re doing so much already.”

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As we’re partnering with Art Night to support them on the streets of Scotland (alongside Dundee’s Street Advertising Services), we chatted to Artistic Director Helen Nisbet about the changes this has brought about for the festival, and teamed up with the curatorial team – Elizabeth Ann Day, Becca Clark and Jamie Donald – for a shoot in the city.  

Since starting in 2016, Art Night helped to develop arts engagement in the English capital with new commissions and works being shown in unusual, unexpected, and carefully curated locations with major cultural partners. From Westminster, Whitechapel Gallery and Walthamstow to the South Bank and Battersea Power Station, 2021’s mid-pandemic iteration of the festival saw them take first steps outside of the city, to UK-wide locations like Eastbourne, Birmingham, Cardiff, Skye, Derry, ‘and crucially… Dundee’ (including a partnership with BUILDHOLLYWOOD that manifested Guerrilla Girls’ The Male Graze as a national series of billboards).  

Now in its sixth year, 2023 will see the festival breaking new ground with its first programme to be held completely outside of London. Travelling to eastern Scotland, Dundee will host Art Night when it occupies the city on the 24th June 2023. With ten commissions by local and internationally celebrated artists occupying both civic and public spaces in the city, the festival will run alongside Inwith – showcasing a cross-section of Dundee’s impressive and varied arts and community programming. Now, Art Night ‘champions the possibilities of decentralisation.’  

With this year’s festival including work by Danielle Brathwaite-Shirley, Emma Hart, Inefficient Solutions, our own previous collaborator Nabihah Iqbal, Tai Shani, Saoirse Amira Anis, Richy Carey, Lucy Mckenzie, Heather Phillipson, and Maria Fusco and Margaret Salmon, they will occupy locations like the Arthurstone Community Library, Greenmarket Car Park, V&A Dundee, RRS Discovery, Baxter Park Pavilion and more. With a curatorial effort like this, Art Night enables people to interact, explore, and engage with their city in a way they normally wouldn’t. Buildings take on new purposes, locations earn new utilisations, and the area feels cast anew.  

To find out more about the developments for the festival and the promise this brings for its future, we spoke to Artistic Director Helen Nisbet ahead of 2023’s edition. 

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Effie Ioannou has travelled across the world and lived in various places, but none have felt more like home than Scotland. The fashion and wedding photographer grew up in Cyprus, ultimately moving to Edinburgh to study and hasn’t left since. Recently engaged to a Scottish man, Ioannou tells me it’s not the only reason she’s lived here for more than 11 years, “I’ve always felt welcome. As much as I complain about the weather, I do love it.” Ioannou’s work celebrates the city she calls home through a cinematic lens, heightening the human senses and bringing fantasy to the everyday. 

Now part of BUILDHOLLYWOOD’s Your Space Or Mine series, Ioannou’s work will be featured across Edinburgh’s historical streets such as Leith Walk. The images will strut along with the people and visitors of Edinburgh – inviting them to step into the world of Effie Ioannou. Although she has been working in this field for only a short time, the photographer has already seen her work published in Vogue Greece but what’s next? The cover. Whether gathering a group of horses, sourcing a retro ball pit or using the local Wetherspoons, Ioannou’s visions often stem from the locations. “…I just scout for fun places and then I say to myself, ‘Okay what would be the most absurd thing to do here?’” 

Although the photographer has no professional training, it’s clear Ioannou has the dedication to learn the craft or rather, learn her own craft. She is self-deprecating and humble, but her work treads across new ground lead by a clear vision. “I just dove right into it and that’s just what came out of it. It was a lot of work when I first started – I was literally just working, every waking moment on it, but it was because I was having fun.” Fun is a word Ioannou carries through her creative language. We catch glimpses of this in her free-hand brushes of colour and mysterious narratives. 

And what should people take away from these Hollywood scenes? “I would like to think that these photographs are for everyone who would like to do photography, and I feel I’m a good proof of that because I haven’t done it for a long time.” Communication is how Ioannou explains we grow and learn from one another, and that’s what these photographs display – the journey behind creating something and the importance of trying. The billboards will feature epic scenes from Ioannou’s mind that live beyond realism, evoking a fun narrative. Below we speak to Effie Ioannou about the importance of collaboration, community, and having the confidence to step outside creative barriers – because that’s where the magic happens.

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As part of BUILDHOLLYWOOD’s ongoing Your Space Or Mine project, the album and its reflective imagery is taking over poster sites across London – the artist’s very own stomping ground. 

Musician, DJ, broadcaster, curator, and producer Iqbal’s openness to converging people and places is perhaps what enables her to turn her hand to so many disciplines and find the flow of where they can take her. Having studied Ethnomusicology with History for her undergraduate degree at SOAS, an MA in History, law conversion and the bar followed – but, as she notes, ‘I felt like there was something in the universe pulling me’. This put her always-nurtured passion for music front and centre. Now, she’s toured the world (with live shows and as a DJ), holds a regular slot on NTS (for a decade and counting), has composed music for the Turner Prize, is a fixture on BBC Radio, and has collaborated with Wolfgang Tillmans. This year, she’s a guest director for Brighton Festival. 

Talking to Iqbal, you can see how she’s carefully connected the dots between a love of music, discovery, and sharing – three passions that work so well together – to succeed in making her own music alongside everything else. ‘I never want to be boxed in, and I never want to feel like I should only do one thing,’ she says. ‘Whether it’s me playing a DJ gig for a dancefloor, or doing a radio show, or talking about my new album, or putting on a Glory to Sound event where I invite different artists to come and perform, it’s all about sharing and exchange of ideas and feelings.’

The post On her second album, Nabihah Iqbal assembles her experiences into an upbeat and hopeful dreamscape first appeared on BUILDHOLLYWOOD.

The Londoner – who recently joined the ranks of post-Brexit Irish citizens – knows about the subject first hand. She went through major family bereavements including the death of her sister in an accident in New York in 2011, and of both parents.  

Grief and loss of all kinds have become a powerful force in her work, including most recently, the Grief Rave. This latest project is a collaboration with The Loss Project founded by Carly Attridge, and the Street Soundsystem, creating dance spaces where bereaved people can dance it out.

Her billboard artwork for Your Space Or Mine tells a story about music and movement in bold primary colours, evoking the ways that the dancefloor can bring us together with loved ones – even those who aren’t with us any more. “I want people to feel the warmth of togetherness,” she says. “We know that can’t happen in this world – we can’t bring our living and our dead together – but we can cultivate that feeling. We can carry those we have loved and lost with us through life, with our feet and our moves and our bodies.” The accompanying words come courtesy of writer Lara Haworth. 

The post Grief powers The Fandangoe Kid in beautiful and unexpected ways, including her latest invention with Carly Attridge of The Loss Project: the Grief Rave first appeared on BUILDHOLLYWOOD.

During the summer of 2021, London-based multi-hyphenate artist and founder of Sports Banger Jonny Banger took over the streets of London with Billboards stating ‘ILLEGAL RAVES ARE NOW ILLEGAL’. Now, two years later the London-based multi-hyphenate artist has once again partnered with BUILDHOLLYWOOD for a second offering of his UK street takeover. This time, however, the collaboration is also courtesy of photographer Gareth McConnell and features imagery from the two artists’ latest project – a dreamy, psychedelic-style zine.

The post “Making noise when everyone is quiet”: Jonny Banger and Gareth McConnell present ‘The People Deserve Beauty’, their anti-establishment fashion zine first appeared on BUILDHOLLYWOOD.

Bonjour is a Queer-run workers’ co-operative in Glasgow’s Saltmarket with the intention of prioritising underrepresented groups in the local LGBTQ+ community. The bar, club, and space is one meant for celebration and safety – hoping to centre the Queer euphoria everyone deserves to feel, while encouraging mutual support among its members. 

In the current climate, it’s not easy to sustain an independent venue – the cost-of-living crisis has already caused plenty of DIY ventures to close or take undefined hiatuses. Bonjour has weathered a multitude of storms thanks to the pandemic, local infrastructure issues, and hugely increased running costs – but is determined to keep being the invaluable space that it is.

The post ‘Yes, I can see the stars’: Shooting for the moon in Glasgow with LGBTQ+ workers’ co-op Bonjour first appeared on BUILDHOLLYWOOD.

The Londoner had begun his creative endeavours DJing and running a blog inspired by the grime he was hearing at club nights like FWD>> at Plastic People. The blog turned into a popular and influential club night, initially at Cable in London, and then into a label of the same name, issuing proper big tunes like S-X’s ‘Wooo Riddim’ and managing artists including Flava D, Swindle, Royal T and DJ Q. Along the way, he’s also worked with youth projects including a stint with Brighton’s Lighthouse and helping Youth Music set up their NextGen fund.

The Yellow Squares started as scribbled post-it notes which the Walthamstow resident gradually began posting here and there, initially on Twitter and then on Instagram. He posted daily in the summer of 2021 and rebooted the following January, posting the now-consistent design hundreds of times in 2022. It was a way of sharing his ideas and instigating conversation with the communities he connected with online, using comments as a kind of R&D lab. They created a powerful place for exploring ideas and generating ways in which people can navigate their way through the interlocking complications of money, art and creativity.

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Emerging from Brisbane in 2016, Confidence Man was formed by a group of four mates messing about with music at the weekends. This casual project, initially conceived with the “basic goal” of having fun and getting high, gathered momentum rapidly. By the time they’d recorded their debut album Confident Music for Confident People in 2018, it became clear that this side hustle was something with the potential to go stratospheric.

Taking the best of 90s and 00s UK rave and pop and dragging it through honey, their irresistible tunes married the hedonism and euphoria of the dance floor with their irresistible if not slightly leftfield pop sensibilities. Combined with their arresting choreography, audacious lyrics and outlandish costumes (Planet apparently designs her own outfits, many of which possess a kind of eccentric theatricality reminiscent of BodyMap), the band set light to that summer’s festivals, making a name for themselves as a charismatic stylish foursome with a sound that captured the mood of the moment.

The post “Fresh, loud, in your face, OTT, fancy, and a bit trashy”: Confidence Man’s Sugar Bones on their new album and their wild times on tour first appeared on BUILDHOLLYWOOD.

A collaborative and immensely creative partnership between composer Bobbie-Jane Gardner, and Academy award-nominated filmmaker and photographer Brian Cross (also known as B+), Music of the Unseen is a project that set out to celebrate the far-reaching contributions composer-arrangers Charles Stepney and David Axelrod have made to the world of music, hoping to give them the credit they haven’t always received. Through studio albums, singles, and later, sampling, each artists’ unparalleled bodies of work have permeated through genres and settings to become seminal pieces. 

Stepney’s and Axelrod’s impressive influence remains often unknown or unacknowledged in cultural history – hence Gardner and B+’s decision to sensitively reimagine their works and pay tribute to them through a live show series. Performed in November 2022 at Manchester’s Stoller Hall, The Royal Birmingham Conservatoire, and the London Southbank Centre, Music of the Unseen saw Gardner and B+’s own artforms come together for ensemble interpretations of Stepney’s and Axelrod’s music, with live visuals; strings, percussion, and wind; experimental film; and curated DJ sets by pioneering selector Marc Mac, adding to the cohesive presentation of their back catalogues and derivative music that followed.  

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For this instalment of BUILDHOLLYWOOD’s collaborative Your Space Or Mine series, Caio Wheelhouse has designed a bespoke piece of artwork, with a seasonal spin on her latest release, Sound of the Morning, which is currently hitting the streets of Bristol. We sat down with Katy to discuss the album, and discover her personal highlights of living in Bristol, taking us on a guided tour of the city’s hotspots and hidden gems.

The post ‘Talk Over Town’: Katy J Pearson’s Essential Guide to Bristol first appeared on BUILDHOLLYWOOD.

After two summers of an eerie silence, courtesy of the pandemic’s social distancing rules, this year fields across the country were finally brought back to life as thousands found their way back to some of the UK’s most iconic festivals. In celebration of the summer festival revival, BUILDHOLLYWOOD partnered with Photoworks, a UK-based charity that champions photography for everyone. The collaboration saw one young creative’s work spotlighted at a series of festival exhibitions, but also on billboards across London.

Chosen to spearhead the project, Nathaniel Bailey is a 22-year-old up-and-coming photographer hailing from a Jamaican family in London. After developing an interest in photography in his early adolescence, it was towards the end of secondary school that he began considering his hobby as a career. “In year 11, my family started to see my passion for photography, and how much I enjoyed it. They loved looking through all the work I was bringing home in my big art folder. They really encouraged me to think about it as a career,” Bailey explained to us. Eventually, he began to find solace in his passion, stating that, “During this time, my Gran passed away, so photography was something positive to focus on. Later that same year, my Aunt sadly passed away too. She would have always told me to keep going with my photography, no matter what.”

Having recently graduated from UAL Camberwell College of Arts, where he honed his craft studying a BA in Fine Art Photography, Bailey explained to us that the biggest takeaway from his studies is that, “there are no limits to photography, trust your instinct”.

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Fire Complex was originally conceived to be seen on digital and paper billboards in the public realm. Kögelsberger wanted the work to record the catastrophic loss of a unique ecosystem and chart the aftermath of the fire. Both in terms of its effect on local communities and the post-inferno clean-up of mountainsides crowded with innumerable charred monoliths. As well as still photography between December 2020 and December 2021 the artist filmed numerous videos of strike teams felling the blackened trunks of these once glorious trees whose post-fire remains threaten roads, powerlines and the few buildings left standing.

Visual iterations of the project are complemented by restorative efforts. For every video posted on Instagram @fire_complex Kögelsberger has pledged to plant replacement trees. The first batch of 144 young sequoias arrived courtesy of the Archangel Ancient Tree Archive. To date more than 6000 seedlings have been planted by the Sequoia Crest, Alpine Village and Cedar Slope communities with the support of specialist bodies, residents and over 100 local volunteers.

The post Formidable, poignant and practical art project wins the RA summer exhibition ‘most distinguished work’ award first appeared on BUILDHOLLYWOOD.

Fascinated by space and how we inhabit it, he initially gravitated toward street photography because it appealed to his curiosity about people, style, and how we signify group belonging. But these interests eventually coalesced in the creation of TSAU, the acclaimed design studio founded by Agyemang which draws on his vast range of influences to create beautiful garments and objects which distil his ever-evolving personal style and his interest in artisanal techniques. “It’s an acronym of The Space Around Us,” he explains. “‘us’ being everyone.”

Talking to me over Zoom, he’s sat in a beautiful, considered-looking room with Moroccan plastered walls and a daybed scattered with bold, embroidered cushions. Sun streams in through a Victorian sash window and it feels like an appropriate convergence of the very London and African design elements that recur throughout the visual language of his work.

The post Bevan Agyemang’s label TSAU is the embodiment of his Ghanaian heritage and ‘London aesthetic’ of his youth first appeared on BUILDHOLLYWOOD.

Time and time again, artists on the rise have proved there are no limitations on art and artists are not always born after taking the traditional route of studying art. That is exactly how artists like Patricia Bugembe find and claim their space in the world of art.

After growing up in Ethiopia, Bugembe moved to Sheffield to study Psychology and Cognitive Neuroscience. “I come from a long line of people who work in the mental health and medical field. My grandfather was a psychiatrist, my mother is a psychologist, and my elder sister is a paediatrician that specialises in neurodevelopmental conditions. And so, then I followed suit and went into psychology and neuroscience so I too could work with people with autism and other neurological conditions,” she explained. It was not until a few years ago, when she turned to drawing as a form of release, that she realised her artistic talent and began to hone her craft.

Since discovering the power of art when experiencing a tough time, Bugembe brought some of her friends together and created the ultimate judgement-free environment: a relaxed art club. “There’s no teacher who “There’s no teacher who knows who will tell us what’s right or wrong. Just us, so we feel the freedom to just sit and draw. With no teacher, and no experts, we’re all exploring from the inside out.” said Bugembe. “So, it’s more about just trying and seeing what comes out, we all just enjoy being free to create whatever,” As well as using her passion to encourage others, Bugembe has also used her rising success as a means of fundraising and helping others. Bringing together her love for art and mental health, Bugembe has raised funds to help black women access psychological therapy through Art for Therapy. On top of this, Bugembe also donates a percentage of her annual shares to the organisation Black Minds Matter.

The post Meet Patricia Bugembe, the artist finding the power in art’s therapeutic tools first appeared on BUILDHOLLYWOOD.

ReGo means “to put aside our ego and go again and again through a continued process of change both in oneself and in society.” With this as a starting point for Our Story in the Making, the cross-disciplinary project has come to embody collective action as it unites London College of Fashion students with East London-based brands, all in the aim of affecting positive social change. Having seen the negative impact of knife crime on the local community, the project’s intention was to counter the problem through fashion and creativity.

The idea was to repurpose knives from amnesty bins alongside other urban waste as inspiration for (and to be utilised within) clothes, accessories, and jewellery. Co-created by young people from East London and local brands Michelle Lowe-Holder, CQ Studio, FibreLab, and The Reclaimery, they’ve engineered the transformation of objects of potential violence into something beautiful. ReGo intended to “connect creatives across disciplines with the aim to illustrate to young people how they can control the direction their lives take by leveraging the power of fashion, making, and storytelling to shift the prevailing narrative around youth violence.”

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At first glance it appears to be a sort of cartoon memento mori, a visual whistle stop tour reminding us of all the vices that’ll ensure we shuffle off this mortal coil sooner rather than later: booze (99.9% ABV… Eek!), fags, debt, drugs, screens, fast food, (un)happy pills and more.

Amidst the frenzy, in the centre of the work, there appears to be a tablet computer with a hand hovering over options to select a virtual experience (which, we are assured, ‘Feels Just Like The Real Thing’). Hiking, Drinking or Drawing, anyone? And then, whatever you feel about the potential excitement afforded by these activities there’s a disturbing proviso. The hand apparently poised to make the choice is, erm, compromised somewhat. The index finger is lopped off. It’s also been severed at the wrist. The radius bone is sticking out. Ouch, it looks nasty! Oh, and on the back of the hand there’s also an open mouth. It appears to be screaming.

The post Existential Yikes! Viktor Void puts ‘Freedom’ through the wringer first appeared on BUILDHOLLYWOOD.

Coco sees themselves as standing apart from the crowd. Being black, queer, non-binary, and neurodivergent, they have often felt a lack of representation in, or inability to relate to, leading figures in mental health, in the creative worlds, or even in broader society. After their own mental health struggles became a catalyst, Coco created a platform – Talk to Coco – that would be an online safe space. They set out to ensure that other people who identify differently don’t endure similar things on their own.

Uniting their work in creative writing and activism, and providing an uncompromising listening ear for people to share their thoughts, feelings, or experiences with, Talk to Coco is now making sure that people who reach out to them always feel understood and accepted. Coco’s honesty, openness, and deep-running empathy has enabled them to become a stalwart of the mental health awareness world. They’ve since come to run creative writing workshops, speak on panels, and collaborate with huge global organisations like Amazon and Yahoo on the issues they’re proud to platform.

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Founded by spoken word artist Emmanuel Nwaohai, SPK ABOUT IT is a voice-over agency disrupting a noisy industry with a brand-new approach. Using its expertise in the field, and impressive network of performers and writers, SPK ABOUT IT is able to “champion authentic voices and diversify the voice-over space”, with “a community of spoken word talent from different walks of life”. Nwaohai’s aim was both to help young poets know the worth of their talent, and help brands to hone in on the real experiences, stories and passion that gives life to a tone of voice.

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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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The pandemic put a temporary halt to more pops of mural joy and thoughtfulness appearing in towns and cities across the UK but he’s back at it now. When we met for a bit of a waffle over a falafel, I couldn’t resist stating the obvious, “You don’t seem that angry!”

“Ha! That goes back to my first email address, when we all had stupid email addresses. If anything, I try to be the antithesis of angry. I wasn’t sure at first but I’ve embraced it now. Adults always ask, ‘Why Angry?’ But kids never do.”

Dan’s creations have graced walls from Reykjavik to Barking, they appear on street furniture in Manchester and Hastings, friends’ backyards, under bridges, beside railways, they’re all over the place.

As straight five-line limericks these compositions are skilful, amusing and often quietly affecting. When transformed into visual artworks in urban spaces (as well as the postcards, prints and paintings) a fresh configuration of word and image evolves.

The characteristic rhythm and rhyme remain but lines are curtailed or carried past the five-line poetic form so viewers are encouraged to re-read, to remake the poems in their minds, to confirm their limerickness. This mode of presentation slows down reception but there’s an agreeable satisfaction in teasing out the original form nestling in the bold illustrative visual presentation.

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From 1^st-6^th March 2022, specially commissioned works for Bristol Light Festival will premier alongside pieces making their city debut, in carefully curated locations on the streets – filling the city with creative light.

2019’s edition included interactive and immersive works, and this year’s programme is set to feature much of the same – with installations and experiential light art pieces to explore. Created by international names, local artists, and Bristol-based collectives, like Squidsoup, Lucid, and Designs In Air, each one has been tailored to its location – filling varied urban spaces with colour, ambience and new potential for enjoyment, showcasing the city in a different light, highlighting both its landmarks and lesser-known spots.

To introduce 2022’s Bristol Light Festival to the city, we worked alongside Bristol City Centre BID to bring its joyful, bright pink logo to the streets, filling our sites with light-flooded artwork. To accompany a takeover of our West Street sites in Old Market, we also constructed a head-turning creative billboard – with a giant, illuminated, 3D version of Bristol Light Festival’s logo, bringing the art to the streets.

The logo was created by local photographer André Pattenden, who manipulated and created light art to form the vibrant and dynamic heart shape. He then echoed the work around different spots in the city, producing incredible shots through the middle of a night to tease this year’s festival launch. We spoke to André about his creative inspirations and processes, life as a photographer, and work for Bristol Light Festival, ahead of its programme beginning in March.

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Impassioned, ambitious and furious, this extensive series of montages is bookended by images featuring black military style watch dials. ‘Past Midnight’ opens the show, economically apprising viewers as to the parlous state the planet and humankind finds itself in. Its watch hands mounted on a WW2 gas mask are nuclear missiles. The time reads 5 past midnight.

In August 2021 the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change published a report prepared by 234 scientists across 66 countries warning that human activity has resulted in atmospheric CO2 concentrations that are higher than any time in the past 2 million years. The United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres said the IPCC report was the ‘code red for humanity, the alarm bells are deafening and the evidence irrefutable’.

In the final image of the CODE RED series the watch dial this time is an image taken by Apollo astronauts in 1972. It shows planet earth as a whole, swathed in its diaphanous, swirling, life giving atmosphere. A hand reaches into the image frame, it’s holding onto a cord attached to the minute hand. The concluding work’s title ‘Pull Back’ reads both as a command and a desperate plea.

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From the start of her career to now, Ronan Mckenzie has quickly established herself as one of UK’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 location and creative workspace. “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 distinctive, genderless fashion (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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Design consultancy Brinkworth, made up of duo Adam Brinkworth and Kevin Brennan, are behind some of the most iconic retail concepts of all time. Working across disciplines like architecture, interior and brand design, Brinkworth was launched in 1990 by Adam and they have since grown massively, having opened a second office in New York in 2017 and completed over 2500 projects across 80 countries in just over three decades. Their award-winning projects span different sectors, from retail to music to hospitality to workplaces and residential design. The projects are often akin to art installations, with interactive spaces and an awe-inspiring, playful approach to the work.

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Some pictures were never meant to be seen. That’s what makes our collaboration with Matty Bovan, the latest in our Your Space Or Mine series, so exciting. The collection of posters features images of Matty in his studio trying on his own pieces, fitting photos that were only ever intended for personal reference. Collaged together with bright, eye-catching colours alongside his playful logo, they are evocative of DIY zines and offer a rare insight into the designer’s process. He designed every poster himself, intending to get across a “certain energy” intended to convey his personal energy into the spectacle of each.

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Lewis started the project with a zero to one hundred grid of ages on her studio wall and over three years proceeded to substitute the numbers with portraits of local individuals. Some subjects came recommended, a couple self-selected, mostly it was a case of Lewis spotting a person she liked the look of and persuading them to take part. And despite her infectious enthusiasm for the project and proven record of making remarkable photographic essays it wasn’t always plain sailing. “Who’d be interested in me?” said Dave (79) on being invited to take part, “Why would anyone want to look at my photograph?”

Alongside a career working as an editorial photographer One Hundred Years is Lewis’ third major personal project following the much admired One Day Young and Hackney Studios. This latest work is reaching the public through various iterations. One Hundred Years is a sumptuous and engrossing book published by Hoxton Mini Press and the entire series has also been installed at Britannia leisure centre in East London. A selection of thirty portraits grace the walls of Shoreditch Park Surgery. On Regent’s canal, behind the Lewis’ studio, seven three metre tall prints can be viewed from the opposite towpath. Lewis said she’d calculated that seventy-two thousand people had walked past these works in the last few months and added “The way you look at them, how you feel about the portraits can change depending on what mood the viewer’s in, what’s going on with the sky that’s enveloping them.”

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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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Representing the charity’s broader aims of inspiring social change and bringing together the arts and culture, the call out came as part of a project to provide space for queer and trans artists on the streets. The chosen artwork has been displayed on sites in London, Birmingham, Edinburgh, Glasgow, Sheffield and Cardiff. Alongside the artwork, the street posters were designed to include QR codes linking to activation pages for each artist, introducing calls to action in support of causes close to their hearts – firmly linking inspiring art with social justice.

Providing the space for LGBTQ+ artists to occupy the streets can help to empower the communities the artists represent. Beyond that, it’s also an opportunity to inspire direct action that prioritises the needs of marginalised people, works towards equality, and aims to eradicate discrimination and prejudice.

Queercircle’s founder, Ashley Joiner, says of the open call, “Occupying and taking back public space is a crucial and empowering tool in instigating positive change. Through their artworks and the campaigns they’ve chosen to support… [the artists] are advocating for social justice and calling on the public to action transformative change.”

After much deliberation, the judges – artist Evan Ifekoya, Artsy’s curatorial director Gemma Rolls Bentley, Queercircle’s founder and director Ashley Joiner, and BUILDHOLLYWOOD’s very own Emma Clackson – chose pieces by Bex Wade, Kgotlelelo Bradley Sekiti, and CJ Reay from Black Lodge Press.

Bex Wade is a London-based documentary photographer, who captures protests, Pride, expressions of otherness and outrage, and moments of solidarity. Kgotlelelo Bradley Sekiti is a South African multidisciplinary artist, reflecting explorations of queer identities through self-portraiture, text and video. Black Lodge Press is a North Yorkshire-based print and micropublishing platform with radical roots, inspired by punk culture and anarchism.

The chosen artists’ pieces covered a spread of different formats and when sat side by side, create a beautiful, impactful, defiant street gallery accessible to all, uplifting LGBTQ+ visibility in cities beyond Pride month. As Bex Wade has noted, “Visibility does not equate to security” – so the activation pages and advocations for important social justice causes that accompany the artwork are intrinsically linked to each artists’ practice, and unify the project’s aims.

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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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Caesar has documented prominent figures in the music industry alongside key historical events including the Handsworth Riots in 1985. He often reworks 35mm negatives into new forms, challenging the notion of religion, sex, history and identity from a Black British perspective.

As a music fan and scholar, Caesar was thrilled when he got the opportunity to be able to document some of his musical icons from the 80s onwards. Over the years, these photographs formed his ‘Muzik Kinda Sweet’ project, where Caesar takes globally renowned artists and captures them in everyday situations.

“When I took these images, it was about trying to photograph the artists outside the context of their stardom,” Caesar says of the street locations where he took many of his photos. “A lot of images and portraits of musicians are usually very shiny and staged. I wanted the opposite of that…I wanted to capture them in a natural setting to illustrate that. It was always important for me to show they’re just ordinary people who do extraordinary things.”

Caesar’s work has been exhibited widely and is acclaimed for documenting Black British history from the street. In 2004, he established OOM Gallery Archive in Birmingham, which represents his photographic archive worldwide.

Caesar spoke to us to reflect on his career, what it’s like taking an image of a musician in an ordinary setting like the street and what he hopes the public will take from the project.

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Rock has been responsible for some of the most iconic album covers of all time – from Queen’s Queen II, Joan Jett’s I Love Rock and Roll, Lou Reed’s Transformer, Coney Island Baby and Rock N Roll Heart as well as Iggy and the Stooges’ Raw Power, and The Ramones End of the Century.

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Anderson’s work for the project takes two of her musician friends and puts them in a street setting, in the centre of the communities where they grew up. Challenging both the viewer and her subjects, her striking images reveal much about music from South London, the street influences which define her subject’s style as well as the community that shaped them all as artists.

Anderson drew on a wealth of experience for the project which included debuting a long-term project ‘MAN’ at the Victoria & Albert Museum in 2018, contributing work to ‘The Self Portrait’ – an exhibition curated by Ronan Mackenzie and working alongside acclaimed filmmakers Spike Lee, Daniel Mulloy and Joost Vandebrug.

 “I aim to empower my subject, whilst disrupting the pre-conceptions viewers may feel towards them,” Anderson says of her work. Here, she reveals more about the artists in her photos, their creation and why she is excited to see the pictures on the streets where they were taken.

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With subjects as vast as childhood friends who have been involved with gang violence, Notting Hill carnival revellers, council estates, everyday characters you see on the street to leading grime and rap artists, his work culminates in a dark, gritty and unique look at modern life in London.

His pictures for this project come from the grime and rap world, with all photographed on the streets where they’re from. “This project is a brilliant way of celebrating two elements that feed off of each other – music and the street,” he says, adding he hopes it inspires others on the streets too.

“There’s also people from some backgrounds and social classes that have an interest in photography or art but may not feel like they’re welcome in gallery spaces so don’t ever think to visit one – this is why projects like this are needed because they essentially give everyone the opportunity to view art and photography in person.”

We caught up with Steven to find out more about his inspirations, the story behind his shots and what he hopes people will take away from his photographs.

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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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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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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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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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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. To find out a bit more about his influences, process and message behind the work, we caught up with the man himself…

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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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‘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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We had the pleasure of interviewing Secret 7” co-founder Kevin King about the incredible project, how it’s grown over the years and find out what’s next.

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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.” To celebrate the launch, we interviewed Myerscough on her work:

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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.

As part of our collaboration we have made the poster artwork downloadable so that you can help spread the message too. Print them out and display them in your window.

Download the poster here

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