Our Wylde girl Harriet has been busy painting a huge mural on Wilder Street in central Bristol. This project was funded through Arts Council England’s Develop Your Creative Practice fund. The DYCP grants set out to support individuals who are cultural and creative practitioners and want to take time to focus on their creative development.
Whilst she’s completed many large projects including a piece on the 79th floor of 3WTC in Manhattan, NYC and stages for Glastonbury Festival, she felt her portfolio was missing tall projects. The world of large scale murals of three storeys tall and over demands an exponentially larger and complex skillset – one that overlaps into familiar territory for architectural and building planning permissions.
This scale mural project resulted in a painting that covered the face of a 6-storey building on Wilder St in St.Pauls. The painting of the project itself was a somewhat familiar exercise, albeit magnified to a larger scale, with the organisation and administrative aspects of the project providing some steep learning curves and experience!
The research, organisation and management of a project this scale rapidly throws any artist into the world of logistics, project management and risk assessment. At Wylde IA we are all about transforming spaces by injecting colour and design into otherwise ‘dead’ interior spaces – street art is much the same, only exterior!
The artwork designed for this mural needed to ignite life into a grey-rendered building whilst also making consideration for the 12 windows that lay across it’s facade. Harriet’s design was focussed around the concept of illuminating creativity – with a thoughtful and ambiguous portrait surrounded by washes of colour and light.
Here’s what she had to say!
“I made the decision to paint a mural on the BS2 Lofts building on Wilder Street and with the knowledge I’d gained from my research (and a few chats with Tra regarding planning permissions!) wrote up a detailed Method Statement of how I intended to safely complete this project alongside an in-depth Risk Assessment. I have developed a whole new understanding of health and safety with regards to public access, footpath closure, public liability and indemnity insurance and Chapter 8 traffic management when closing areas off and getting the boom-lift from storage to the painting site. All of this understanding and knowledge will inform and assist me in all the future large scale projects I undertake!”
Check out the project film here by Beeston Media:
