Work

Hay Festival

I created two giant 2x2x2m cubes, a smaller cube, two 1x2m panels and twenty A1 sized panels for the Hay Festival.  The Hay Festival happens each year in Wales and it is all about literature and the arts. The town of Hay-On-Wye is really nice but I didn’t get much chance to visit it as I was drawing most of my time there.

Anyone could come along to the Sky Arts dome where the cubes were and colour them in, completing the work how they saw fit. If you were amongst the first 200 people to come and colour in each day you got an exclusive tote bag designed by me too, for free. The pens for the event were kindly provided by Posca.

The cubes looked like this to begin with, just black lines on white. One of the cubes was based on the idea of ‘the arts’ with different artworks, artists and art forms being referenced. They are all intermingled together because I think they all influence and borrow from each other. I wonder how many of the different references I popped in there people recognised. The other large cube was based on my experience of being at the Hay Festival. It featured drawings of ice-cream, mud, people, rain, mountains, sheep, books, newspapers, stalls selling stuff and people colouring stuff in.

The nice thing about this project, other than getting paid of course, was that lots of different types of people really got into it. Young and old and very old all seemed to enthusiastically colour in my work. Some diligently stayed within the lines but others, probably free-spirited types, fancied scrawling and scribbling over everything to make their mark. There were no rules to how people responded to the work, so even though some bits of the cube really got heavily covered in Posca pen ink, it was allowed. It was interesting for me to see how people coloured in and drew over my work as it was, of course, very different to how I would of done it. Lots of it looked excellent too.

Whilst I was drawing on the cubes people wanted to colour them in, even though I wanted to finish the drawing first. The Sky people had to make these signs and cordon off the area I was drawing in with rope barriers. But people still couldn’t wait and lent over the barriers to try and sneak some colouring in. Maybe they couldn’t read the signs, so much for it being a literary festival…

The famous fatwa author Salman Rushdie was at the Hay Festival and actually did some colouring in himself. Unfortunately no-one had a camera on them at the time to capture the exciting moment, so later on in the day I took a photo of this look-a-like colouring in instead.

As this a festival some people chose to wear funny clothes, above is a photo of a boy in a cape. I heard one woman refer to him as ‘Capey’ and her husband told her to keep her voice down in case he heard her. I don’t think the boy in the cape had any super powers though, so the husband need not of worried too much about any sort of retribution.

See a little video someone made of the cubes from the first day here. It’s not that exciting but it’s better than nothing.

Big thanks to all the Sky Arts people and RPM people at the Hay Festival for looking after me and inviting me to be part of the festival.