Residency: Graniti Murales

Best to hold phone horizontally!

Graniti Murales

This was a Group Project carried out by the Canadian group of women artists collectively known as "13 Feet off the Ground."

My participation in this project came as something of a surprise, because my art does not normally include painting or murals. My main interests are installations and drawing. I was however asked to join the group and very much encouraged to participate in Graniti.

The Graniti organizers of the residency want to broaden the scope of the murals project, and expressed a wish to recover a small property that had been sadly neglected and used as an unsanctioned waste dump. I embraced the idea and proceeded to clean the site and make temporary installations from some of the artifacts found there. Other Group members contributed rocks painted to reference three of the murals.

The Graniti organizers responded enthusiastically and used the transformed site as a tool to show the community how an unattractive space could be converted to become attractive and useful. They intend to make further use of the site for other art projects.

Click on this large image for more information

13 Feet off the Ground is a collective of established female artists based in Vancouver, Canada They came together through an opportunity to participate in a residency program, 'Graniti Murales', in Sicily. where they created contemporary murals for the ancient exterior walls of the small town.

Within their group they have a range of artistic styles represented; figurative, landscape, realism and abstraction. They expressed these styles through the creation of 11 individual murals, 1 installation and a collaborative mural.

This image shows the collaborative mural that takes the form of a "postcard" of small images each referencing one of the various other sites created by the group elsewhere in the town.

References:

Group web page

Sicilian web page of Graniti Murales organization

This was my challenge: take a neglected space, clean it up, and make an installation from objects found there on the site. And, incidentally, help the local teachers teach the kids the merits of cleaning up the neighbourhood.