Bristol Art

Named in Timeout’s Top 100 most influential UK creatives 2012, Tom Bingle aka Inkie, has emerged as one of the most prolific graffiti writers in UK history. He has painted with some of the most notorious artists on the scene, including Banksy, Nick Walker and 3D. Denounced as “Banksy’s right-hand man” by The Daily Mail and simultaneously lauded by The Times, his work has been published in books such as Banksy’s Bristol, Children of the Can, Graffiti World and Street Fonts and well-respected magazines such as Rolling Stone, GQ and Dazed & Confused. In 2007, he was featured in the LA based global graffiti documentary Bomb It. His work is coveted by celebrity followers including: Cara Delevigne, Robbie Williams, Jade Jagger, Fatboy Slim and Sean Pertwee.

Instagram – @inkiegraffiti

Website – www.inkie.co.uk

Flx is a contemporary fine artist and muralist, who lives and works in Bristol, UK. A veteran of the first wave of British graffiti and street art, he began painting walls in Bristol in 1984, aged 15, before going on to study for a degree in Visual Communication at the University of Central England at Birmingham, where he graduated in 1993.

After studying for a Diploma in Youth Work at City of Bristol College in 2002, he combined his arts practice and youth work as a community arts facilitator, painting murals and delivering related youth arts projects, across Bristol and the UK, then subsequently as far afield as South East Asia and East Africa.

In 2012 Flx co-founded the community murals collective Paintsmiths of Bristol, whose large-scale works celebrating the life of Nelson Mandela or parodying the ‘special relationship’ between Donald Trump and Boris Johnson, gained global media attention; whilst their murals in schools and community settings focused on celebrating those communities in everything from aerosol and masonry paint to retroreflective road marking materials. Currently his focus is on my personal studio practice and solo mural/public art projects.

Flx’s practice explores themes of synergy and interconnectivity, both conceptually and visually ­­­­– through the playful interaction of colours and forms. Forced into an intensive phase of experimentation and development during lockdown, his practice has taken him on a journey from making multi-layered abstract acrylic painted ‘colourscapes’ into an evolving, personal visual lexis.

Both abstract and representational, collections of silhouetted cultural and autobiographical references take form in overcrowded spaces, some shouting their meanings, whilst their neighbours keep them private and coded.

The inspiration for his design for the Nelson Street Mural came from the famous local myth of Goram and Vincent: engineers, rivals and towering heroes of the region. The legend of Bristol’s giant brothers, Goram and Vincent, tells of how the siblings competed against one another, to dig the Avon Gorge and Blaise Valley, in a race to drain an enormous lake, that supposedly once covered a huge area of land between Bristol and Bradford-upon-Avon. The giants were set the task by a local woman, Avona, to help her decide which of them to marry. The wiser of the two, Vincent, paced himself and used all his engineering knowledge to dig the far superior channel through the rock to form the Avon Gorge. The wisest of the three, of course, was Avona, who delegated the entire task to the brothers, and got both valleys dug without ever lifting a finger.

His thought process when designing this mural was quite simple: whilst undertaking a site visit he looked up at the multi-storey brutalist architecture surrounding him and spotted Stik’s twin giants (on the other side of the street) still looking for each other, 10 year after they were painted at the See No Evil street art festival in 2011 (where he also painted). They reminded him of the story of Goram and Vincent, so he went away and looked them up. With the concept and rough drawings under his belt, he set about creating a design that encompassed and worked with the huge window in the middle of the wall. Having this fit inside the giants’ chests and stomachs seemed the best solution. When considering the meaning behind the story and its relevance to Bristol, it felt like a good metaphor for the city’s growth and how it evolved, with a combination of brains, brawn and ingenuity making it happen.

Instagram – @felix_flx_braun 

Website – www.felixflxbraun.co.uk

Adam is an award-winning British artist & designer of Argentine & Japanese heritage based in London. Trained in architecture, Adam’s atelier works in spatial design and art of all scales from video and prints to large public artworks, architecturally integrated ornament, as well as products, furniture, interiors, publishing and academia.

Adam’s work has been exhibited in London, Paris, New York, Milan, Melbourne, Rome, Tel Aviv, Mumbai, Vienna & Basel, amongst other places, is held in the collections of the Design Museum, the Sir John Soane’s Museum, the Carnegie Museum of Art, the National Gallery of Victoria, the Abet Museum, & the Architectural Association, and has been published widely.

A vibrant, multicultural, creative and thriving metropolis like Bristol is constantly changing and evolving. Much like families who have children, whose members age, and pass on to younger generations precious items and heirlooms, cities constantly create artifacts which tell the story of a moment, and pass them on to future generations, silent but visually eloquent vessels of material and aesthetic meaning.

Quilts were a traditional way in many societies for creating practical items that were imbued with such love and meaning, which through the disposition of simple geometric forms and colour combinations, could tell the whole story of a life, or a family unit, and would be passed down from generation to generation.

It is with this in mind, and drawing on his Latinx heritage, that Adam has carefully stitched together a complex and layered urban quilt for the city of Bristol, an epic story told in bold ceramic geometries, at once inscrutable and totally accessible and enjoyable by everyone. He hopes this artifact will be loved and become like a welcome old friend in the background of Bristolians’ everyday lives, much like the warm embrace on a cold night of a quilt made by one’s great grandmother.

Instagram – @adamnathanielfurman

Website – www.adamnathanielfurman.com 

Carlo Hornilla describes himself as freelance multidisciplinary artist, illustrator, storyteller and generally awkward human being. He is passionate about feelings, connection and the complexities that they involve. He explores them through a lens of humour, visual storytelling, collaborative endeavours and absurdity.

He says “By doing so, life might feel less confusing and easier to navigate… maybe? At least we can have fun in the meantime.”

One of his main wants for this design was to have a piece that could interact with the space provided that would not be possible otherwise- to which he decided to have a spiral wrap around each column. He loves doodling, loves the freedom to make nonsense happen and then let stories from that nonsense- making meaning from the seemingly meaningless. And eventually, it becomes a little organised chaos.

Instagram – @kaarokaaro

Website – www.kaarokaaro.art

HazardOne was recognised as one of the Top 5 female graffiti artists in the UK [The Guardian] and the Top 25 female street artists worldwide. [The Huffington Post]. She combines rich colour palettes with illumination and modern-age glitch effects to create striking portraits using traditional free-hand graffiti techniques. From a 7-storey mural in the heart of St. Pauls Bristol, a community project on the Arizona-Mexico border, to the 79th Floor of 3 World Trade Centre, New York – Her work takes her all over the planet!

Her artwork offers a nature themed, biophilic design that will inject colour and plant life into the urban environment in the city centre. The mural design will be a floral/botanical piece that is decorative and bright, almost as a large scale wall-paper print. Not only are plants and flowers a positive and colourful addition to a busy city street but they benefit passers-by by increasing their connectivity to nature which reduces stress, improves cognitive function and well-being.

Biophilic elements are being used increasingly in interior design schemes and architecture – this includes artwork and print design, so using this theory on a large scale on an external wall of a building in a street where there isn’t a lot of greenery.

Her developed design is themed around oversized flowers and foliage where the intention is to create a vertical garden in aerosol – embracing the popularity of living walls without the maintenance! The floral offering is also a quiet nod to the nearby St. John’s cemetery, the offering of flowers as a 2000-year-old symbolic action and ritual to express our bereavement, condolences and respect.

Instagram – @hazard0ne

Website – www.hazardone.co.uk

Tower Lane Brass Inset Paving – The Department of Small Works

The Department of Small Works set up a letterpress print shop in 2013 in order to protect printing presses and lead and wood type. It runs workshops to show people how to set type by hand and how to use the beautiful old presses. Nick Hand and Ellen Bills design and print letterpress and often collaborate with poets, writers and artists. The surface design for Tower Lane is based around phrases that would have been used by Everards letterpress printers, but now used for a different meaning and in everyday common use. This design is a homage to the tens of thousands people in Bristol who worked in the printing trade, and in particular letterpress printers. The Old City was the centre of this skilled industry. Everards in Broad Street was right at the heart of the trade. Every few paces under your feet in Tower Lane, you will see a phrase that came from letterpress, but which has come into common everyday use, through it’s original meaning being adapted to an everyday event. The fonts are chosen from the fonts that would have been used by Everards who printed timetables for the tram company and technical manuals for BAC (The Bristol Aeroplane Company) as well as many items in common use that would be printed by a jobbing printer such as Everards.

Upper and Lower Case

The type case was key to letterpress. The case was the equivalent of our computer keyboard. It was laid out for efficiency and each area contained a set of one letters (a sort). So the most common letters (vowels) are central near where your hands sat and also the biggest areas as you would use more. Originally the there were two cases one for capitals and one which sat below it for lower case, hence upper and lower case.

Stereo type

In the days of Everards as a letterpress printing company, lead type was set by hand and if a job, such as an advertisement was used more than once, the compositor (who set each letter by hand) may decide to make a stereotype, a moulded copy that would be kept for reprints.

A dab hand

Printers used a ‘dab’ to apply ink onto the letter blocks until they were ready to be applied. Whoever had the job to make sure there was even coverage of the letters with the mushroom shaped instrument was thus graced the title of ‘dab hand’, hence our common use of someone skilled at a certain ability.

Make a good impression

Good letterpress printers have a different idea of what a ‘good impression’ might be. For them it is kissing the paper with lead or wood type evenly and lightly so that ink is evenly and perfectly applied. You can see how ‘Make a good impression’ has come into common parlance as a definition of being the best you can be.

Hot off the press

Newspapers used to be made by the ‘hot metal printing’ process from pouring molten lead into the printing block moulds. The hot newspapers were then distributed, with the first readers grasping the juicy stories before anyone else, leading to its more common meaning of breaking news stories.

Mind your p’s and q’s

Now denoting to minding your manners, the origins though are from the fact that in relief printing letters are back to front, so a p looks like a q and vice versa. Printers had to warn their apprentices when distinguishing between the backward facing lowercase p’s and q’s which often led to confusion and errors.

Out of sorts

For those moving in the printing world, a sort is another name for a single letter of type withing the type case. When you run out of lead type for that letter, you’re literally, out of sorts. This of course is very frustrating for compositors who would have been setting type by hand for several hours and now had to think about starting again with a new more full case of type. Nowadays, when we feel under the weather or a bit grumpy, we’re ‘out of sorts’.

Come a Cropper

Come a Cropper is wildly held in the public’s imagination as derived from the very popular treadle platen press, the Cropper, which was very popular in Victorian times. Any printer who was unfortunate enough to catch his fingers painfully in the moving platen would come a cropper. Hence adopting the phrase is associated with an accident or unfortunate occurrence.
In the days of Everards as a letterpress printing company, lead type was set by hand and if a job, such as an advertisement was used more than once, the compositor (who set each letter by hand) may decide to make a stereotype, a moulded copy that would be kept for reprints.

Website – www.departmentofsmallworks.co.uk