Bristol’s Burg Arts board – a former billboard now used to showcase community art – has hosted a lot of artworks over the years, but usually they come one after the next.
Never afraid to break the mould, the People’s Republic of Stokes Croft have installed dozens of artworks past and present from their weekly People’s Art Club meetings in a billboard-sized collage.
In a blog on the PRSC’s website, Benoit writes:
Over several months, and about five Art Club sessions, we assembled the various prints, drawings, paintings, paper-cut artworks, collages etc into six strips, 1x3m long, adding more and more layers as we went. In classic People’s Art Club style, the whole process was fairly anarchic, with glue and paper everywhere, but after a final session of adding more PVA to the front, and making sure everything was thoroughly stuck down, we were ready to install.
This was far from the usual install process – a billboard is usually a set of 12 single pieces of paper which can be pre-soaked. This time it was a set of six, lumpy rolls of collage, with multiple layers of paper, of all different thicknesses, which even incorporated pieces of plants and had stencils pasted to the surface!
Fortunately, with the expert help of the Adblock Bristol Arts Group, the install went smoothly, and the riot of colour, texture and imagery was unleashed on the un-suspecting residents of St Werburgh’s [in east Bristol].
Sometimes people doubt the value of really inclusive community arts projects like the People’s Art Club, or of the kind of anti-consumer spaces that Adblock Bristol seeks to promote as an alternative to the onslaught of commercial messaging advertisers would plaster our town in, but just looking at the wonder on the faces of children passing when it was installed wipes any doubt away.
Jim, one of the PAC regulars involved, stood back and simply said “it’s amazing!” And all the people passing that we spoke to loved it too.
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