Will St.Leger sprays our streets with knowledgeable street art pieces, conveying variable messages in a witty manner. If you think it’s the typical everyday stencil on a road sign, think again. He’s somewhat of an “artivist”, you might say. As part of City Spectacular, his tour of the city’s street art will help attendees discover the stories and the work of over 20 street artists.
Explain your involvement in the Laya Healthcare City Spectacular festival?
I’ve done street art tours before and City Spectacular got in touch with me and asked me to do a street art tour for them as part of the event. I thought it was a great idea because you are bringing the arts outdoors. Street art is an artform that exists 365 days a year and it’s constantly there. So getting people to expand their involvement in the city and looking at the art around them was one of the things I was interested in doing and one of the things they were interested in doing too.
Your work is quite subversive. How do you feel when advertisements try to bombard your vision and mind? Is your art work a form of shouting back “No!”?
I don’t think the work I do is necessarily a reply to advertising or to the bombardment of commercial or corporate messaging. I think it’s actually starting another conversation with people, a different conversation. You could say you open up a dialogue with people on the street when you start to resent work that isn’t classified as advertising and people can pick it out straight away. They can see what is unlicensed artwork or aliased artwork. A lot of the stuff people will see on the tour is totally legit stuff, but there’s a lot of aliased artwork out there as well. When you open up a new dialogue with people you begin to build a new framework for the way we inhabit our city. When you walk down the street everyday you see advertisements and posters but it is that one little sticker, one stencil or one paste-up that is a direct communication from one human being to another. Not a corporate group or marketer but one human being that captivates and will push through all of the other junk that’s out there because people recognise when another person is talking to them. Not somebody that wants to sell you something. You must understand that street artists or graffiti artists are not trying to sell you anything except a vision, their vision. The only price to that vision is another motive thought. That’s the great thing about street art.
Are there any other mediums that you use apart from street art to express yourself?
Yes, lots! [laughs] I think it’s very important for me as I don’t have rules for any other people because I don’t follow anyone else’s rules. It’s essential for me to be able to express myself in different forms through the arts because that way you get a real 360-degree panoramic view of life… I guess! I often use theatrics – and I’ll call it that in a very broad sense – to express ideas. Some of the shows that I have done before have been very visual shows. For example, in 2007 I did a show named Art Raid. The premise of the show was that I produced about 60 pieces of work but seventy people were allowed to come into the show, of course there were too many people for the amount of work there. They were told at any point an alarm could go off which meant they had the right to take any piece of work from the wall and run away with it, which they did. They fought each other for it, they talked about it and they tried to psych each other out. So in a sense the audience became actors and I was the director. I set up a situation then I let it play out. Each night we did it, it was completely different. The situation was different and so was the atmosphere. People started to work together and against each other. It was a fascinating view into the underbelly of people’s psychology. It was weird! I work on some music too with a girl named Sarah, an electric duo named Faune. I do a little film as well. I create films about the city and things and I see there. I once made a three minute film on the Secret Life of Light. I went around Dublin at night filming light reflecting on different surfaces and people. The entire visual thing is overpowering.
What emotions do you hope to evoke after the tour?
One thing I can guarantee is that they will never be able to see the city in the same way as before. Once your mind is opened or exposed to a certain phenomena to something that was always there but you missed out on it because your mind wasn’t trained to it then it’s so easy to let it pass by. But once you are aware of it, it’s really hard to un-see things. Perhaps like heavy metal music; some people say, “Oh, that’s just noise!” The thing is, they’re just not familiar to the structure and their ears aren’t fast enough.
After you come on this tour you will be walking down the street and not only will you have the skills to be able to look down and look up, that is key to street art. Survival of street art tends to be height. People will be able to look out for stuff and I almost wager that they will be able to impress their friends by doing a name check on particular work as well as the artist’s name. At the end of the tour I will be quizzing you! It’s impressive how much people will see in over an hour. They will see the city in a completely different light.
Will’s Street Art Walking tour will take place on July 12th.
For more of our coverage of the Laya Healthcare City Spectacular, check out our interviews with Hunt & Gather and Orlaith Ross
Words: Seana Henry
