Aberdeen City Centre prepares for 1500ft paste-up wall in worldwide collaborative project!

Art can be humble while still making an impact; as much craft as high concept, while still grabbing attentions and changing minds. The more accessible the initial process of making art becomes, the more likely it is to reach a wider audience.

Looking past the widely-known terms of Street Art & Public Art, and further beyond familiar ideas of Graffiti, Muralism and Stencil Art, we wondered how many people would know they were passing by a ‘Wheat Paste’, a ‘Paste-Up’, a ‘Locative Collage’. The answer to that was ‘not enough’ – a whole world of often-overlooked art operating in a space that is uniquely liminal (which in this case we like to think of as somewhere between legal and criminal).

With that in mind, Nuart has secured 1500ft of space in Aberdeen City Centre to create what we hope will become the world’s largest paste-up wall, bringing three separate collections of art together:

• Nuart’s founder and creative director Martyn Reed, in partnership with flyposting legends UNCLE, will bring a curated selection of Nuart artists to the wall, line up to be announced soon.

• Flyingleaps, the subversive counter-culture arts initiative founded in response to the Brexit referendum result, will celebrate its fifth anniversary with street poster art spanning its revolutionary archives, created by a global coalition of urban contemporary political artists.

• Nuart are now inviting subm issions from across the globe, in an ‘open call’ to artists, poets, witches and pirates to contribute to the spectacle, creating a truly collaborative concept and ignoring the borders that become more oppressive each year.

A Paste-Up is simply an artwork on paper, pasted to a wall with wheat- paste, a form of self-made glue that – in America at least – became the name of the actual practice.

Paste Ups are more often than not regarded as an artworks in their own right, usually created in the studio before being transplanted on the streets. The practice crosses over into notions of the more familiar fly-posting when art becomes the vessel for political sentiments and social calls to action. Locative Collages are a relatively new iteration of this idea, wherein small collages are created and then pasted, or “located”, in public spaces.

At the same  time, we witnessed a huge upsurge of creativity outside of those institutions: DJs streaming sets; opera singers delivering arias from their balconies. Within Street Art, we saw a renewed interest in smaller, more human-scale projects. 

In many ways, Paste-Ups and Locative Collages, disciplines that demand little more than a tabletop, scissors, magazines and /or paper, are as much related to “craft” as to the rarified world of contemporary art.

But perhaps this is what the world needs right now: a less ‘stuck-up’ and judgmental look at the collective capacity of our communities to engage in shaping public space. A return to a more honest involvement in art as it’s created within cities.”

Submissions are now open, send it, and as long as it isn’t massively offensive, we’ll paste it up.

Ship your posters, poems, print outs, photos and collages to :

“STUCK UP”

THE ANATOMY ROOMS

MARISCHAL COLLEGE

SHOE LANE

ABERDEEN

AB10 1AN

UNITED KINGDOM

Paste up by Aida Wilde, 2017