THE FRONT WALL 2008 -2017
BYRD’S PUBLIC STUDIO WALL IN LYNEHAM CANBERRA PAINTED IN OVER 40 ITERATIONS
Story of The Front
This opportunity arose at the invitation of artist/ owner Paul Jamison and ended when the business changed hands just shy of a decade later. Run as a kind of ‘open-studio’ (A place to play and test ideas at scale), this exterior wall was painted over 40 times between 2008 and 2017.
At first I used this as a space to produce stuff I felt wanted painting but didn’t fit any other space/collaboration I had going. These could be a set of letters, image, or even pattern. The other ‘rule’ was to resolve the composition with each new intervention. As time passed this became more refined, resulting in each new ‘resolution’ of the wall composition requiring I retain some of the received composition into the new. The wall was visited quite randomly at first, as inspiration and available time coalesced. Later it became more regular and then even structured.
While some years I only painted here 3 or 4 times. However from around 2015 I attempted a new composition each month, finding 2 or 3 days to be here.
Early palimpsest 2009
Nude Rawings (variations) 2012
Fall guy 2013
Red Basket 2013
Cockatoos (variations) 2013
Some kind of Blue 2013
Rules of Summer 2015
Wasps 2016
Tropical Toxic 2016
Embrace (collaboration with Atune) early 2017
Paul's garden 2017
Wadeyed 2017
The KEEP
An art space initiated in 2015 by Joanna Nelson and byrd as a response to first floor foyer changes in the Centre Cinema Building. In byrd's words:
The genesis of this project has been the diminishing of public spaces within the building used by the architects Joanna Nelson and Ann Cleary. One result being the manifestation of a dead end hallway with one transparent and one opaque wall, at the entrance to the architects' offices. A goal of this project is to not accept the wall and turn it into yet another ‘feature wall’, but to draw attention to how incongruous it is.
Thus the architects invited the graffiti artist byrd to curate a cycle of artistic interventions –rather than a single “solving” gesture to an eyesore [unwelcome rupture] this wall now becomes a catalyst: a field of play, of new ideas, of design potential and remains impermanent.
Byrd’s long-established research practice examines spatial and political activism in the urban setting, and make do & mend hacktavism; manifest in both street and gallery action.
“To these ends I have enlisted a number of my contemporaries to collaborate on a series of interventions. Every two or three months the space will be revisited.
I don’t know what is going to happen. The people I have asked to be involved come from divergent fields, each with strong established practices. A post-graffiti abstract muralist, a gallery based abstract painter, a tattooist, a performance based colourist, a teaching architect, a digital artist and printmaker, a conceptual florist, a writer, and a performance based sculptor and so on, each with a very particular lens on the world.”
Collaborators. Kurt Laurenson | Ann Cleary | Emma Beer | Kirsten Farrell | Hanna Hoyne | Yolande Norris | Andrew Carbine | Caren Florance | Paul Summerfield | Narelle Philips
