Working on a public mural is unlike anything else I do in the studio. The scale alone changes everything. You are not making something that can be moved, stored, rehung. You are making something that belongs to a wall that belongs to a street that belongs to people who never asked for it and now have to live with it every day.
That responsibility is something I think about a lot. Public art is a kind of proposition. It says: this corner of your world should look like this. You had better be sure you mean it.
Bradford does not photograph like a city that needs saving. It photographs like a city that is already saving itself, quietly, in ways that do not make the news.
The Stronger Together mural — a collaboration with Ruth Agbolade and Molly Harris as part of the Healthy Minds Untold Stories initiative — was made in response to a specific community need. The brief was around mental health, unity, resilience. Those are heavy words. The challenge was to translate them into colour and form without flattening them into slogans.
We spent time in conversation before we spent time with paint. Listening to what people in the neighbourhood actually wanted to see, what they felt was missing, what had happened in that space before us. Public art that skips this step tends to look like it arrived from somewhere else. Which it did.
Bradford has shaped my understanding of what community means in practice rather than theory. This city is complicated and underestimated and full of people doing extraordinary things in ordinary circumstances. The mural is an attempt to hold that up, to make it visible, to say: this is here, this matters, you are seen.
I left the wall feeling like it had taught me as much about my practice as any studio session. Sometimes the best thing a canvas can do is refuse to be yours alone.
