In April 2014 I began collaborating with Hamilton House and Coexist on a series of public space projects that would help transform, albeit for a short amount of time, the façade of the building on Stokes Croft, and therefore, the atmosphere of the street in general. Stokes Croft is a renowned area in Bristol, for it’s colourful graffiti, it’s anti-establishment messages, music venues, squats, riots, and vibrant cultural scene. Hamilton House itself, has changed Stokes Croft in very positive ways, by transforming a building where junkies used to shoot up on it’s doorsteps, to an artist studio building with music venue that plays live every night.

 

With this in mind, I was commissioned to create some kind of intervention for the first ever Bristol Art Weekender that took place in May 2014. All the other organizations involved were already regularly funded and well established. Museums and galleries such as Spike Island, Bristol Museum and Arnolfini were the main protagonists of this festival, and little attention had been awarded to the arts community in Stokes Croft. Therefore, it was particularly exciting that this project would be the only one representing the area in this high profile arts event.

 

I was working with Sean Redmond as my Coexist liaison, and we originally wanted to wrap the Hamilton House building in white material so we could project on it from across the road. However, this was clearly overambitious for the time scale and budget we had available. So to work up to that idea, we decided to keep it relatively small and create something within the Coexist Gallery on the ground floor of the building. On this occasion we would do a small-scale project and in consequent years we could make more interesting projection mapping projects.