Tagged: community art
Summer is here! What’s new on the Piazza?
We are delighted to have a beautiful new painting by artist and founder of Collaborative Painting UK, Luke Palmer, aka Acerone. Funded by Hotwells & Cliftonwood Community Association, Luke painted this stunner in less than two days. Martin Booth, a journalist for Bristol 24/7 happened along while Luke was painting and wrote this article.
Art under the Flyover Facebook page has changed to Friends of Hotwells Piazza & Art under the Flyover. We’re really keen to get more people involved in helping make the piazza more of a community space and while Hotwells’ largest open public space is officially called Cumberland Piazza, not many locals relate to that name. It’s lovely the way people passing by appreciate all the work we’ve been doing, but it would be even more lovely to have a bit of help. Our next Community Gardening Day is Monday 15th July 2-6pm only a couple of days before we get judged by the Royal Horticultural Society South West in Bloom team. If you have ideas or expertise to share, it’s a great opportunity to have your say!
HCCA has also commissioned Bristol Wood Recycling Project to build some new planters co-designed with Anna Haydock-Wilson which locals helped us fill in our last community gardening day on May 19th and Alex from LiveGraft has been back on site to help us with some more greening of the Piazza.
Sadly, in early May, weed-killer was sprayed all over the Piazza, destroying nearly £2000 worth of plants and labour. The sedum beds and chinese poppies were about to burst into flower but were almost completely destroyed along with several hebes, ferns, heuchera and others. We have had to put energy and resources into restoring the beds and we have once again requested that the council does not use weed killer on the Piazza. With climate change causing ever extreme weather around the globe we need as much carbon absorption and as many pollinators as possible.
On that note, we’re in for a prolonged spell without rain and we were unable to expand out rain water harvesting capacity during an extremely wet June as someone had dumped a motorbike in front of the water butt and store-room. Can you help? Waste water is welcome- it can be as little as encouraging kids to water the planters using their water bottle on the way home from school or a more regular offer. Contact Anna by email if you’re able to bring water to site in times of low rainfall.
7/8th September- Brunel’s Other Bridge group are hosting activities in the Cumberland Basin to demonstrate our local heritage and amazing engineering. Over that weekend we’ll provide some arts activities on the Piazza for everyone to join in
Art Trail and Healthy City Week 2016
On 15th and 16th October we are participating in Bristol’s Healthy City Week and the West Bristol Arts Trail to profile re-use and greening of a neglected space and neglected objects.
We have been thinking a lot about art and climate change and how to adapt urban spaces into ‘climate ready’ community resources. After consulting with the Hotwells & Cliftonwood community in 2010 & 2011 we commissioned a ‘masterplan’ to ‘green’ large areas of the Cumberland Piazza. We used this plan to communicate with the council about what the community would like to achieve, but to dig up the tarmac proved prohibitively expensive, and we have been unable to raise the kind of money we need to do this.
So, we began to take an incremental approach. Local people generously donated funds to match some council Neighbourhood Partnership Well-Being funding for us to plant 8 new trees. Then, we commissioned the Bristol Wood Recycling Project to build us some scaffold planters, which was paid for by money from developers’ contributions. Luckily we have a big pool of volunteers via Hotwells & Cliftonwood Community Association who helped with assembling and planting.
Volunteers gathered again when it came to painting the the pillars, with Anna designing the colour scheme and organising tests, consultation and painting days. Dave Bain and his team responded amazingly to the spirit of the place and produced a ‘hidden forest’ of murals.
The impact of the painting helped us get a bit more funding from the DCLG Pocket Park scheme, HCCA & Bristol City Council’s Neighbourhood Partnership Wellbeing fund and we have built some sculptures of recycled concrete cast into re-used pallet boxes. Those pallets got turned into more planters and so did the paint pots.
But, there’s still a lot of tarmac left and more plants are needed to combat emissions in a busy in a road system of flyovers. It is becoming harder to access public funding so we’re constantly searching for imaginative solutions. We have developed a new ‘masterplan’ that embraces the DIY approach and puts re-use at the centre of our approach. Please come and have a look at this and all our interventions.
You can help us plant unusable hard hats and draw a ‘living wall’ on 15th & 16th October. We will also be running a ‘green gym’ which is another way of saying, please help us with some gardening and in turn you will get some exercise! Anna Haydock-Wilson, Luise Holder and Amy Hutchings are around at times over the weekend to show and sell prints and sculptures and talk about their work with re-use and regenerating spaces. If you have ideas for more art projects or about stealthily greening cities, come and share and let’s get some collaborations happening!
Details of times and activities:
- 12-5pm Saturday 15th & Sunday 16th: talk to us about plans for the site
- 12-5pm Saturday 15th & Sunday 16th: ‘Green Gym’ help us clear the weeds and prepare the planters for the winter months
- 12-4pm Saturday 15th & Sunday 16th a chance to meet Amy & Luise and buy beautiful prints and ‘ready mades’
- 2-4pm Saturday 15th: Paint and draw plants on our future ‘living wall’
- 2-4pm Sunday 16th: Plant some re-use objects, including hard hats- bring your own old bike helmets!
‘growing more plants might do more to improve our environment than making art about climate change‘
It’s been a Colourful Year!
2015 has been a year of colour under the flyover -so much of the work HCCA has done to secure funding and permissions finally came to fruition.
In March we began testing colours for the pillars, preparing a ‘canvas’ for a mural by Dave Bain. We had been keen to explore a tonal range and and Anna had been playing with ideas for a long while. When Dave refused to begin a mural design until the pillars were done a trip to Hartcliffe B & Q was the only solution. Armed with 21 tester pots, a few brushes and a 5 year old, Anna dotted squares on pillars and left them for locals to complain- no-one did!
Ray Smith worked with the Landmark Practice to design the planters. Bristol Wood Recycling Project cut the scaffold planks and they were built and filled by committed local gardening volunteers. Bristol Zoo’s Wild Place project was hoping to provide us with native plants from their seedlings, but it hadn’t been a great winter for growing, so they raided Blaise estate nursery for the council rejects and delivered a striking variety of flora, including a very non-native banana plant. The nasturtiums are still flowering!
The pillar painting began in earnest at the last weekend of April with about 30 volunteers turning up. It took until mid August to paint them all, well as far as Anna’s arms and a 5 metre pole could reach- but at least Dave was now happy and produced some beautiful designs and created a magical ‘hidden forest’, with his team, in less than a week. And he braved the heights to reach up to the carriageways!
In July Sharing Communities, the Bristol 2015 Neighbourhood Arts project for our area, collaborated with Young Bristol for an event called Your Place to Play for young people to share ideas about what they wanted to do. 60 people came and joined in the conversations and activities which included BMX demos and tutoring from the amazing Matti Hemmings, a design workshop for a skate park from Canvas Spaces, a newly local business keen to get involved and beautiful floor painting from the DO15 team. People sharing thoughts and ideas for the future of the flyover continued at our Community Celebration Day in September with 30 more people joining us for a walk and drink at the Rose of Denmark.
In October Sharing Communities worked with the Portway Sunday Park team and a group of UWE architecture MA students, Luke Copely-Wilkins, Luke Carnaby, Matthew Smith and Tom Sale, to create The Wayfarers, a moveable bandstand which travelled from the Piazza to the sheer rock face just beyond the old funicular railway. The journey down the car-free Portway was led by the shocking pink Ambling Band and the recycled structures hosted musicians and local poet, Bob Walton. The acoustics across the Avon Gorge were wonderful!
On the wettest windiest November day the UWE team organised a Cumberland Basin Bonanza, rigging up a temporary sports pitch, adding the pre-cut bench elements to the planters and making more from our growing stash of pallets. Riverside garden centre donated more plants and we discussed yet more ideas.
On December 16th Green Trees contractors tarmac’d our skatespot, designed by local skaters and drafted by Andrew Iles, completing all the works Hotwells & Cliftonwood Community Association had designed and funded. Without the enormous amount of volunteer hours from locals and Bristol-wide creatives it wouldn’t have been possible!
So, our colourful year has finished and we have new people involved and new ideas to explore for 2016.
- Blue/Green are some of the colours for next year as we aspire to look at flood risk and climate change adaptations to the flyover
- A games area is another priority, designed with and for teenagers. Funds are being applied for and ideas are being drawn up by our talented team of young architects
- We hope for more live arts, collaborations, performances and even a Hotwells Carnival!
If you have any ideas you’d like to share or make happen in this space contact admin@hotwellscliftonwood.org.uk, like us and post on facebook, or tweet @hccabristol
Thanks to Trudy Feeney and her team at Bristol City Council Cleansing Dept & Mike Lawlor and Kurt James from BCC Neighbourhood Partnerships for all their support.
Art Under the Flyover 