The artists who hit the wall

For years graffiti has been treated as a sign of urban decline. But thanks to graphic design, galleries and a generation that has grown up with it, is street art moving towards the mainstream?

AS YOU APPROACH Limerick city along the Dock Road, hallmarks of the post-Celtic Tiger urban landscape greet you. Abandoned kitchen showrooms and empty wine warehouses. Spaces that speak of an age of aspiration and consumption now suffering near-fatal body blows. Closer to the city centre there’s a walled and derelict concrete yard, its interior and exterior walls heavily decorated with graffiti.

At a glance this may seem like yet another sad signifier of recession and stagnation. Yet to the graffiti artists who use these walls to showcase their talents, spaces like this represent not symbols of urban decay but potential antidotes to it.

Known locally as the Spot, the yard, which enjoys a fragile semi-legal and semi-sanctioned status, has managed to become nationally renowned as a site where enthusiasts can practise their art in relative peace. Free, at least in the short term, from the anxieties and legal difficulties that have historically plagued the practice.

While reactions to graffiti in Ireland have traditionally tended to be hostile – dismissing it as simple vandalism, something to be eradicated from public spaces – recent years have seen both an aesthetic maturing of the form and an increased awareness, among local councillors and community groups, of its positive possibilities.

Someone whose work has helped drive this reappraisal is Darrin Finnegan. He is one of Ireland’s most respected graffiti artists and the organiser of Drogheda’s long-running Bridge Jam, the country’s premier graffiti event.

Finnegan argues that the gradual increased tolerance towards graffiti owes much to the form’s absorption into mainstream consciousness, through its widespread adoption by graphic design and advertising.

“People in positions of power have grown up with the idea of graffiti,” he explains, “so they understand it more than when I was in my teens, trying to source funding. Talking to youth workers back then . . . it was so alien to them.”

One of Finnegan’s most ambitious projects was last year’s group painting of the Falls-Shankill peace line, in Belfast.

The project illustrates graffiti’s potential as a progressive public art form. “I had been doing work in the North anyway,” he says, “and through that I managed to forge links with the ex-prisoners’ association in the Shankill.

“They were very concerned that today’s kids wouldn’t do what they had done, and wanted to change the look and feel of the place. They came up with the concept of changing some of the more hateful murals – celebrating violence rather than culture – and came to us with the idea of doing what we do on the walls. That resulted in us doing the peace line, which, from our point of view, is a fantastic surface – it’s a mile of concrete.”

The project was a success. “It’s gone down very well,” says Finnegan. “The people of the Shankill like it, and we repaint it regularly.”

This points to a fairly obvious conclusion. Find a context in which graffiti speaks to, integrates with and even adds to the surroundings, and concerns about its vandalistic aspects recede.

The resistance to graffiti typically stems from a popular perception of it as an indicator of urban decline. Unsurprisingly, this view is strongly opposed by Ireland’s graffiti artists.

Will St Leger, a Dublin street artist and activist, sees nothing oppressive or corrosive about graffiti and argues that, if anything, the opposite is true: “There’s nothing nicer than bringing colour and creativity to bare walls. There’s a ridiculous notion that graffiti intimidates people. I disagree totally. I think it inspires them, bringing life to blandness.”

THOSE MOST COMMITTEDto the art form readily acknowledge the importance of responsibility and self-regulation, as the Galway graffiti artist Baqsr explains. "We have our own rules about what we do and don't do. It's a standard thing that people don't hit religious or very historic buildings, or private homes."

The code is maintained, Baqsr explains, through a strong sense of community and co-operation. “Everyone in Ireland knows who everyone else is, so we work together.”

In addition to his street pieces, Baqsr has also exhibited work formally in gallery spaces, most recently in a show at Galway City Museum.

Dialogue and exchange between the mainstream art world and that of graffiti – formerly its disreputable distant cousin – have become increasingly common. The provocative and popular work of the Corkman Conor Harrington, for example, fuses figurative oil painting and graffiti on a single canvas.

While developments like these indicate a willingness by graffiti artists to engage socially and aesthetically with a wider world, the scene remains comfortable with its outsider status. As Darrin Finnegan puts it: “The nature of our subculture is based on anonymity. None of us has any wish for public fame or acceptance, as our work, though often very public, is produced for purely personal reasons.”

How best to accommodate and encourage this thriving subculture is a problem local authorities may struggle with for some time. Perhaps a first step would be to recognise the fact that Ireland’s graffiti artists see themselves as creators, not destroyers.

“We all see ourselves as adding to rather than detracting from society,” Finnegan says. “I don’t feel like I’m damaging anything. Ultimately I feel like I’m adding to the beauty of the surroundings through painting.”