Welsh from Everywhere: Maindee Library
Full Colour Maindee was a 2024 street art project where a collection of local and national artist were invited to create street art to help draw new people to the Maindee area, whilst giving locals a renewed sense of pride in their home. I was delighted to be asked to contribute and decided on a scaled up version of my Welsh from Everywhere project.
I set up my portable photographic studio in Llyfrgell Maindee Library + and offered all day drop in sessions for consecutive saturdays and got a great response from locals who wanted their images to feature in the project. As ever my 'Welsh from Everywhere' sitters had originally hailed from far and wide, including from Nigeria, India, Italy, Madagascar, Hong Kong, Poland, Pakistan and Bangladesh. It was great to meet and photograph such a diverse range of people that call Maindee home.
I was originally given a large terrace end wall to paste up my whopping A0 prints, but a combination of anti graffiti paint and torrential rain brought all the prints tumbling to the floor. Plan B was to go guerilla and paste the images wherever I could find space down the length of Maindee High Street, and this time they all stayed up except a photo of local MP Jessica Morden which was removed in minutes by disgruntled constituents! Almost all of my Welsh From Everywhere photos are in black and white, but with a project title like 'Full Colour Maindee' I felt I had to inject some colour into them and here are the results.
