Crushed Can - An object born out of frustration

For a first foray into sculptural work it feels odd that the initial motivation was a sense of frustration. Having witnessed clients spending big on installations that imitated graffiti but lacked authenticity I was perplexed as to why they weren’t engaging with locals writers or just writers in general. One of the first lessons in anything to do with street culture is that you can’t fake it and a fake will always be found out.

The reality is that most work produced by writers, street artists, muralists tends to be 2D and at a base level is an image on a wall. Whilst things are slowly changing and street based artists are increasingly exploring with new media and different artistic disciplines, there just wasn’t many local options for 3 dimensional work produced by someone with a genuine background in graffiti, let alone options that actively seek to celebrate graffiti. It’s with this in mind that I began the process of producing “Crushed Can”. An object that any Graffiti writer utilises as a primary tool and would routinely see crushed up and discarded in abandoned buildings and along the train lines. To push that graffiti aesthetic further the entirety of the can is covered in tags contained within shapes derived from my typical letter structures.

This is a response to the idea of “I like the pretty stuff but not the tagging” which is pervasive throughout the community. I’ve always thought of this as a default response to something misunderstood as opposed to genuinely disliked. Hopefully by presenting these tags in this format it will work towards the public questioning their stance or at least be open to learning more and develop an educated and informed opinion.

Ling - 2021