I have recently been hanging around one of the main ‘peace walls’ in Belfast.
This might seem weird but this imposing inhuman architecture is a mighty fine free graffiti wall and the best thing about it is the plastering is pretty smooth so it is great to draw on and it takes paste ups really well.
I have always been a little hesitant to use ‘peace walls’ in my work as they represent very real monuments to a civil war whose ghosts still haunt the fabric of the city but after repeated trips to the walls I began to make tentative sketches and there are the results so far.
These sketches are on thick corrugated cardboard on which I have previously screen printed and painted in a vaguely random fashion and the idea with these is to show the walls not as some eternal alien architecture but as walls made by humans that evolves and changes over time. Walls that will one day come down.
I have uploaded some of these sketches to my webshop and you can find them in the paintings page over here.