wheat pasting – guerilla art…

Wheatpasting art?

Wheatpasting art is a contemporary art strategy popular with Guerilla Art tactics.  Its easy to do!  Wheatpasting is posting posters on urban walls, shopfronts, abandoned properties, etc. with homemade glue made of flour and water.  Various recipes exist but I go by a basic 4:1 of water to flour recipe.  Simple as, put the whole mess in a pan, heat to boil, whisk constantly, once you get bubbles, turn it off.  Can be used right away or saved for later, lasts about a week in the fridge, but don’t push it.

Wheat Paste is Cheap and easy, ECO-ART Glue.

This blog will document some of the wheatpaste art projects I’ve done, and show you how easy it is for you to do wheatpasting in your hometown, wherever you live!  If you have flour, water, paper, and wall, you can do wheatpaste art!  Keep reading to see what I’ve done, and thanks!

Wheatpaste Butterfly, Idée Pont-Aven

After seeing some of my wheatpaste projects earlier in this post, a local home design shop here in Pont-Aven, asked me if I wouldn’t mind doing a pop-up of my Papillion series on her one of her windows.  It’ll be there for a few months we hope.  Papillion, or butterfly, is a symbol of hope to me, and one we need more than ever these days.

Another update to this post, we managed to get an article in the local paper, Le Telegramme, featuring the paper art mural and also talking about my Ca Roule project.

 

 

As this an application in need of durablity, on a busy commercial street, we decided to not wheatpaste the art, and instead used conventional wall paper paste.   But the spirit is the same!  The substrate is OSB plywood, so the professional glue worked amazing.  The paper art mural is still up even after a 5 weeks!!  Thanks for all the support, below, is a video time-lapse of the paper mural installation, and following the video is the older version of this post.

 

Wait, what’s Guerilla Art?

Guerilla art is when you don’t really have permission or don’t have any at all.  Its been used by graffiti artists for millennia.  They found ancient graffiti on the colosseum in Rome!  Some artists have made a thing of it, notably, the Guerilla Girls, a project totally worth looking at that examines the institutional inequities of the Art World.  My contemporary art projects are a lot more humble, in fact, in many cities, wheat pasting isn’t even a crime and is tolerated as a non-destructive critical element of free speech in a democratic society.  Check your local laws and get on with it.

So, what am I wheat pasting?

A little project of mine on an abandoned factory dating back to the WWII.  The town has bought the building complex and they have very ambitious plans for the 30,000 m2 property, but its going to take some time.  Here’s a video tour of the site in French with subtitles led by the town Mayor.

Here’s a link to the town’s website that gives more detail and updated information, follow it and find out more.  The town have also provided documentation of the project, here.  Quite a lot for not really having any budget at all.  I’m totally in support of their project and in the meantime, I’m making the best of it and really enjoying how the fungus, algae, and other critters are transforming this ephemeral wheatpaste art project after three weeks…

 

There are 4 B&W CancerUs images and each is about 2m’s long.  The title hopefully explains my intention, but its inspired by thoughts of society, traffic jams, our anthropogenic crisis, anyways…Here’s how it started…

Update on CancerUS, after heavy storms, all four came down sometime over the winter holidays, discovered their demise on the 30th of December, 2022.  Stay tuned for updates.

I’ve also started a butterfly, ‘papillon‘, project that will be expanded, more on that later…here’s a shot of it on another section of the same building complex.  The project hopes to inspire hope, something that we all need these days.

 

 

 

As a follow up to the Papillion and CancerUS wheatpaste posters, I’ve also started a “DEMAIN” project, a bit tongue in cheek about the civic vibe in town. After a few town meetings and conversations with other citizens, there is a wide range of opinions about the redevelopment of the site by the town.  Of top concern is when, what, and where the project going to be.  The Mayor has been upfront about it, but the townspeople are not so trusting.  So, my wheatpaste art poster project is a play on when or what is going to happen tomorrow (DEMAIN).  Here are some photos, first batch is shortly after install and last batch are after 4 weeks.  There is a red fungus/algae that grows a lot here on all the rendered walls, so evidently my art is feeding it.

This first image below is how it starts, low budget, tiled print on A4, then manually stitched together.

Below, is the image on the wall.

Below is an overview, of all five that I’ve done…

 

 

Following up, are some images of the project after 4 weeks…

 

 

 

 

 

If you like any of these images, you can find versions of them in my shop, linked here.  I’ll update this project as it advances, evolves, degrades, and otherwise transforms.  Thanks for all the support.