Junk Yard Jam - 2022

Events

21 Sep

I had another fantastic weekend in Crewe, Cheshire with an amazing group of talented artists from all over the UK, at Urban artistry’s Junkyard Jam. Yes, it is a real, functioning scrapyard full of beautiful smelly filth and the best kind of trash.

I have painted at this event twice before, the first time with SNUB23 Back in 2019, and again in 2021 when I painted a giant ocelot on the side of a van. This year I wanted to take it to a new level and create a piece which interacted with its environment. Especially when it came to the crushing part.

Pretty much anything is open to being painted here, especially vehicles. A huge range of artwork is produced including old-school graffiti lettering, photorealistic murals, illustrative designs as well as characters and abstract pieces. All in different media from stencils to spray paint to sculpture.

My design was a giant cat painted on an upright van all with Kobra spray paint on a big beautiful orange background.

I chose this design as I wanted to create something that looked like it was interacting with the claw, right before the moment it was destroyed. I am so happy with how the final result turned out.

Now for the crush…

At the end of the day after our paintings are completed. Our artwork is CRUSHED by a giant metal claw. As always, it is so so much fun. People always forget how temporary graffiti art is, it usually always has a very short life span. Crushing the van you’ve just painted is the perfect representation of graffiti’s temporary nature. As a street artist, you can never be precious about your work, it’s a tough lesson to learn, but without that understanding, you can lose touch with the actual meaning of street art and you can become disgruntled when your artwork disappears, gets painted over, vandalised or crushed into a thousand pieces. It’s an important reminder that nothing lasts forever, and that there is beauty in destruction.