Coffee with Graft: Local Mural Artists

We’re catching up with Sophie, who’s become a familiar face around the Settlement Site over the last few months! Sophie is one half of Graft Community CIC, along with Rob. Graft recently transformed The Swannery from a grotty pub to a work of art, and more recently have been working their magic on some of the Settlement Site rooms.

Hi Sophie, thanks for taking some time to talk to us! Tell us a bit about Graft…

Hi, lovely to catch up! Graft Community CIC is the non-profit wing of our main business Graft, which we have been running for 14 years. We specialise in community mural projects, engaging with local people of all ages and backgrounds through hands-on workshops and co-created murals that reflect and celebrate the local community, history, heritage and wildlife.

Tell us how you first got involved with Wellspring Settlement.

We were first contacted by Gabrielle Lobb at Wellspring Settlement, as she was aware of our work and was keen to have one of our murals on site. The original plan was for a small mural as part of the garden renovation, and we applied to a couple of funding sources. Amazingly we were successful with two separate grants – the National Lottery Community Fund and Bristol City Council’s Originators Fund –  and also received a donation from National Grid! This meant we were able to work with many more local groups, and also look at a bigger site for the mural. Fortunately all this coincided with the brilliant work being done to transform the former Swan pub into the Swannery youth club and resource centre, so Wellspring Settlement asked if we would like to paint the outside, and we jumped at the chance!

The Swannery was a huge job – how did you come up with a design that is rooted in the community?

We ran a series of workshops with local groups, aiming to reach people of all ages. We worked with the Art for Wellbeing group, the Little Library at the Micro-campus, Barton Hill Academy, City Academy, and of course the Swannery youth club. We also worked with the absolutely brilliant Barton Hill History Group, whom we had been following and admiring for some time. They added a great deal to our understanding of Barton Hill’s past, and their knowledge and ideas inspired many elements of the mural design. There was also a fantastic moment when we were talking about the Dug Out youth club being the birthplace of Bristol graffiti, and showing a book about it, and one of the group said “oh, that’s my son on that page”! It was amazing to be teaching spraypainting to the mum of one of Bristol’s original graffers!

In the workshops, participants created their own spraypainted canvases using stencils based on the themes of the mural design ideas as well as local flora and fauna. They also contributed ideas, stories and suggestions for the final mural.

Through the engagement workshops and surveys, as well as our own research, we gathered ideas for the design elements which would represent Barton Hill’s community past and present, and some of the community hubs and meeting places which are now lost or threatened. We work in an ornate, pattern-based style inspired by Arts and Crafts and Art Nouveau pattern design, so we reflect stories and places through symbols from nature and pattern design, and weave these together into a mural.

For the Swannery, we included elements such as the rhubarb leaves for the Rhubarb Tavern, cotton flowers to remember the hugely important cotton mill, and flourishes from the pub sign of the Russel Arms. Plus the dancing rats to connect both with the legend of local ratcatcher Hopper Chinnock and the area’s links to Banksy! The colour palette was inspired by the new colours of the tower blocks – a great idea suggested in the youth club workshops. You can read more about all the design elements on the signs in the Swannery windows.

The structure of the pattern was inspired by a pattern called Ianthe by Liberty, an Art Nouveau design popular at the time the Barton Hill Settlement was founded.

Was it a big change, going from a huge mural to the smaller internal ones you’ve just done in the Settlement Site Rooms?

 Yes, definitely! It was also very nice being indoors, and not at the mercy of the weather – especially as we were painting them in January! We were thrilled when Wellspring Settlement told us they were renaming their rooms after elements of the mural, and asked us to paint a small mural motif in each room. It was a lovely job to do, and Wellspring Settlement is such a nice place to work. Everyone made us feel very welcome.

One of our tenants. Headway, was involved with the room murals – can you tell us a bit about that?

 That’s right – the internal mural idea came along at the same time we were applying for funding to run workshops with two charities who had both shown an interest in working with us. One of those was Headway Bristol, a brain injury charity based at the Beam Street site. We made a successful application to the Quartet Community Foundation’s Express Grant, and local firm Burges Salmon also contributed funding and volunteer work towards renovating the rooms. This all meant we were able to run the workshops, paint the murals, and involve Headway’s service users in the project. As well as making artwork inspired by the mural designs during their drop-in sessions, they also came up to the Settlement Site to see what we were doing, and to lend a hand painting some of the background colour! It was a lovely way to link the two sites, and to link the workshops with a current mural project, giving some real-life work experience to the service users. We are now hoping to work with Headway on a mural for their new building in Kingswood.

 Did they find the experience useful – any feedback from them?

 The group engaged so well with the project; in the first workshop session, a few people were unsure at first, but by the end everyone was joining in with the spraypainting, and when we went for the second session, they were queuing up to have a go! One older gentleman was particularly adept with the spraycans, and it turned out he had done some graffiti art in his younger years! We love discovering things like this, as well as bringing spraypainting to a completely new audience. One of the most reluctant participants at the start was one of those who ended up helping us paint the mural background!

The Activities Coordinator said: “we are so glad you guys came in, you always bring such a lovely energy to the centre, so we can’t thank you enough for this”.

The rooms look far more welcoming and cared for now, do you find your murals help improve how a community relates to a space?

That’s definitely what we aim for in all our community projects. We try to engage with a wide range of local residents to find out what they love about their local area, and we celebrate those things through the mural designs. We consciously focus on nature and pattern, as these are themes which appeal to a broad spectrum of people of all ages and cultural backgrounds, whereas depicting specific words or faces can make some people feel excluded.

We find that our community murals don’t generally attract tagging, and we get a lot of lovely positive feedback while we are painting and afterwards. Of course, you can never please everyone, but we hope that a lot of people will take pride in the work and feel that it makes the location feel more welcoming. We are inspired not only by William Morris’s designs, but by his belief that craft and beauty should be accessible to everyone.

The room murals serve a practical purpose as well – we’re hoping that people will find it easier to find, for example, the Strawberry Room than Training Room 1. It’s now got a great big mural inside and a smaller version on the door!

 Absolutely! We loved Wellspring Settlement’s idea for renaming the rooms, and we also love the fact that we have been able to return after painting the main mural, both to continue working with the community and to create a legacy inside the building which links to the original mural project. Plus it makes the building a lot more fun to explore! The beauty of using flora and fauna is that it’s very visual and can be understood and appreciated by everyone, regardless of age, ability or native language. So we hope the imagery will make the building more accessible as well as more welcoming and cared for.

On our last day of painting, we brought our children to the Settlement Site after school – they are the real bosses of course, and they toured the rooms to carry out their quality control checks! Luckily we got the thumbs up from them, and they all chose a favourite room. What’s yours?!