Beyond Muralism: Foreword from Nuart Director, Martyn Reed. In curating Nuart’s “Go Big or Go Home” Edition in 2010, we drew a line under the growing idea in our culture that scale mattered – that the larger the mural, the greater the social impact. We started exploring the fringes of our culture, the spaces between public art and street art, art and activism. Here we found a rich and underrepresented body of unsanctioned public art practice, a people’s art created by outliers that fit with our original ethos and form a growing alternative history of art in public space. Nuart’s “vision” – to make art, like music, part of people’s everyday lives – is embodied in Paul’s work. This work also quietly extols the values we set out to use our platforms to promote: fairness, equality, and honesty, while being playful, principled, passionate, authentic, and connecting communities. They’re easy to forget for the viewer in a culture that has quickly grown to accommodate other more neo-liberal aspects of the art establishment. Paul’s work is a valuable reminder that the most powerful work, the best “street art”, has always offered the viewer “agency” – the opportunity to go home and have a go yourself – giving us all the opportunity to become artists and activists.

 

MZM Projects, Director Statement: “One way or another, even the documentary nature of this project didn’t stop us from paying sentimental tribute to our favourite gay artists: Derek Jarman, Robert Mapplethorpe, Luca Guadagnino and surely Paul Harfleet. With this piece, we want to believe that the day “when homophobia ended” becomes one step closer.” – Kristina Borhes