Taken from The Mercury.
Article: REBECCA FITZGIBBON.
Photograph: DAVID BELLAMY -Clarence Council.
CLARENCE Council and Ruffcut Records bring street art, music and culture together in the annual ST.ART Festival.
The ST.ART Art and Music Festival set up camp at Rosny Barn on Saturday August 28, 2010, proudly supported by Attitude in the Mercury. With a stencil and aerosol art competition totalling $2500 in prizes, an exhibition, free walls for the public to paint murals on, t-shirt stencilling, breakdancing demonstrations, live hip-hop MCs and DJs, and more, this all-ages celebration of street art culture is a brave event.
It is the state’s only stencil and aerosol art exhibition and competition, giving local artists a chance to display their skills and win prizes in an art competition and exhibition for a medium that has largely been pushed underground.
Graffiti and tagging are a destructive issue that councils are struggling to address across the state, and this is where Clarence Council shows itself as fresh, progressive, constructive – open to looking at ways to work with youth, instead of against them.
“Street art is increasingly being recognised as not only the visual expression of a subculture but the artists are being accepted into the mainstream art world,” said the council’s community arts officer, Tracey Cockburn.
The ST.ART exhibition is an excellent example of the clever techniques, materials and concepts that the artists work with.
Clarence Council has been working with Ruffcut Records to facilitate workshops on legal aerosol and stencil mural painting at Primary and High Schools around the area for the last two years.
Providing creative solutions for artists, the annual ST.ART Festival at Rosny Barn is an integral step towards supporting artists, protecting private property, and moving forward through education and encouragement of artistic merit.
link: Supporting street art Bec’s Blog – The Mercury – The Voice of Tasmania