City Mapping: Creative Methods
Sharing creativity and ideas in through street art is and opportunity to engage the public with questions and themes that are important to us. So on our second day of our second weekend together, the group started by touring some of the well-known pieces of street art in Cork.
Getting inspiration from examples of existing street art in our own city was the foremost step to creating our own work of art as a group. We were to learn of the plans for our group project, soon...
First, we visited a piece on Western Rd. near the Lancaster Gate apartments. The piece was made by a London-based group in the past few years. We took a minute to discuss what we liked about the piece and the effects we thought it might have on the nearby community.
The second piece we visited was a "Before I die..." piece, at North Main and Kyle St. The "Before I die..." pieces have been made in many cities all over the world by artists and non-artists alike. The project is available online for free download so that any one who appreciates the piece's presence in their city can create the piece themselves.
We took time to read the responses people put on the piece--some funny, some crude, some admirable, some moving. We discussed the nature of interactive murals/street art, and how involving citizen participation could be used for creative and positive change.
Our third stop was a mural on Main St. With this mural we discussed different techniques for making street art. This piece is made like a collage, with printed images on paper that are tailored together and then sealed over, to create the large, colorful images in the mural. Using printed images seemed to suit this mural best, with its finer printed text, small details, and styles of faces. This work is by Cork based artist Tom Doig.
Then, we visited a piece was made by young people from Cork in a creative project facilitated by Mayfield Arts. We watched a stop-motion video of the making of the piece beforehand. This informed our experience of the steps took to make the beautiful mural. This mural was done mostly in paint with some elements of collage. Seeing the work in person and listening to the stories about the hardships and successes of the process were very inspiring. This price of street art proves testament that large-scale painting can happen under any weather conditions!
The last stop on our mural walk was another piece by a group from Mayfield arts. This group used lines of poetry they had written, applied with white paint and stencils on a black, textured background. The piece exists on wooden boards that block some sort of entry way that used to be in use on the Grand Parade and South Mall, near the bridge across from the Quay Co-op. One can see images of figures beneath the poem and feel a history of public messages on these boards.
Back in our building, we started plans for our group project: a mural of our own! We learned briefly how to create in Photoshop the stylized portraits we would use for our mural.
We broke into teams to draft possible compositions for our art piece, considering the inclusion of our portraits and lines of poetry, which the group had written the day before.
Our concept: "In Our Tomorrow." This was the main thought behind the lines of poetry written in the group activity the previous day.
We quickly assumed our skills and responsibilities for the project at hand, because we were to complete the mural in less than two days. Participatory processes like this with groups can often take much longer. We worked at quite a fast pace to get to see all the elements of the process in the short time frame we had for the weekend.
We were taught how to create stencils with stylized Photoshop images and card. We traced our Photoshop portraits by projecting the image onto the wall and tracing the black areas that would be cut out to create our stencils.
Teams became busy mixing the limited color palette for the mural...
Creating our portrait stencils...
Choosing the font for the pillars in the mural that would have text, too...
Planning how the lines of poetry would best fit compositionally into our mural...
And priming our background!
We decided on a limited color palette of blues, skin colors for our portraits, blacks and whites. We were inspired by the calming capacity of the blue, which we felt worked well with the concept: "In Our Tomorrow." Responding to what we hope for "In Our Tomorrow," the group felt a sense of connectivity and fluidity should be expressed. We thought blues were conceptually relevant, and we thought of the River Lee, which is visible from the location of our mural site.
We wrapped up the second day of the weekend with the groundwork done for our rapidly developing artwork.
