.artist talk
* Mike Ballard

written Michelle Heath

The Gherkin, The Shard, The Cheesegrater, London’s skyline is filled with incredible architecture and the cranes and scaffolding that pepper that view is evidence of its ever-evolving identity. At street level though, the experience is quite different. Site hoardings shroud these spaces in secrecy and create barriers within the public realm.

Artist, Mike Ballard, finds these spaces to be symbolic of so much more than development and innovation. These spaces evolve to become a type of artistic canvas with the marks of construction crews, advertisements, graffiti, and council attempts to ‘repair’ tarnished hoardings. These canvases tell stories and create images that Ballard finds intriguing. From prints to sculpture, Mike Ballard creates a space for utilitarian, temporary structures to become the focus rather than to simply hide away and blend into the urban surroundings.

LE MILE had a chance to speak with Mike Ballard to find out more about his work within London’s busy streets.

During your time as graffiti artist, you preferred to be called 'graffiti writer'. Can you explain your preference for that?
I was a ‘writer', as the type of graffiti I was most interested in was all about the letterform, in both tags and pieces, it was about letter styles and writing my name, so I always considered myself a writer more than an artist. It was purist graffiti, really focused on letters and connections between the letters. I also painted characters and backgrounds, but these were just embellishments of the letters, the name always took center stage and would be the most judged part of the piece by other writers.


Graffiti art can have a very short timeline before it is altered or covered by another artist. Was your transition into the artwork you do now in search of permanency?
My transition into the art I do now had more to do with maturing, both personally and artistically. I lived through a golden era of graffiti in the UK, and gradually became bored with the scene and the way it was becoming more socially acceptable and not as underground as it was when I started. Also, the type of graffiti I wanted to paint was illegal, and I was becoming too old to be running from the police and facing further prison sentences. I had also begun making work in my friend’s studio, whilst still painting graffiti, and the transition was very gradual, over a number of years. I became far more experimental and explored a lot of different techniques of painting other than spray painting. I love that graffiti is temporary, it’s part of its nature, and now I’m more interested in the remains of graffiti and also its removal, than graffiti itself.


Apart from being a sort of canvas, do you see site hoardings as intriguing? Alienating? Oppressive? What is it that inspired you to explore them further?
Yes. I love seeing all the different site hoardings in the city, the different colors and textures are fascinating. It’s a sign of constant regeneration, a thin line between the past and the future. They are alienating but also very intriguing, I want to know what’s on the other side. I find Hoardings are very symbolic: ownership, territory, the very temporary nature and always on the street exposed to the weather and marks, gentrification and the displacement of communities, there’s a lot of significance to me using hoardings as a material in my artwork. Their very nature and history lend so much to the pieces. My first interest was seeing council workers painting over graffiti and not matching the right color of the original hoardings, and I love the un-painterly marks and gestures, then I started thinking more about the significance of hoardings and the way they form part of the familiar visual language of a city, and are overlooked. I love going and finding new sets and taking them back to the studio and transforming the sheet material into a structure of its own rather than being a simple threshold.


Would you ever consider exploring another city like you do London to inspire another body of work?

Yes, absolutely and I do, I’m always on the lookout for new hoardings and love exploring new cities and areas that I’ve never been too. Hoping to make some work in the Netherlands this summer.

.artist talk
Mike Billard
speaks with
Michelle Heath
first published in:
issue 26, 01/2019

Sao Paulo in Brazil implemented a law that prohibits outdoor advertising. How do you feel that action impacts the artist community? Do you fear that a similar law could be introduced in London?


I would love all advertising to be banned, I hate advertising, it’s unrelenting, I look in my facebook messages and there are adverts there now, it’s just so intrusive, always being sold something, I find it disgusting. The world would be such a more beautiful place without advertising. I visited Sao Paulo in 2013 and it was blissful not to see any advertising.


You've said that you're fascinated by the marks left behind by the removal of posters and stickers. Is your art a means of preserving what remains or exploring the history of what was previously there?
Yes. I guess I’m really interested in the temporary visual language of city life. It’s not so much a preservation, it’s more about the abstract marks made during its removal, like found paintings. I find the city offers so much in terms of visual noise and background information. It’s all there. It’s just a matter of finding it and exploring the possibilities. The sticker paintings are really enlarging and re-contextualizing these small overlooked marks and remnants.


Do you every return to sites after you've created work based on what you found there to see if it has changed at all?
Yeah, I pass by some of the sites quite often and it’s good to see how the wood I’ve replaced is now becoming part of the environment, often they get written on within days, and I recently started numbering and signing the pieces that I put in place of the hoardings I’ve taken, and I document the process.


Do you have a favorite borough of London that you find particularly fascinating?
I recently moved to a new area which is further east and is new to me, so lots of exploring to do, there’s a lot of building going on, lots of new materials. It’s an old industrial area near the river and lots of development going on. That’s what I love about London, even after 25 years of living here, there’s still places to explore.

credit
header & content image (c) MIKE BILLARD