Bringing graffiti inside
Graffiti artist Kairau ‘‘Haser’’ Bradley has an exhibition in Palmerston North that is bringing the street inside. Carly Thomas spoke to him about how he moves from the outside in.
Kairau Bradley stands in an empty shop that will soon become a gallery space. It will be filled with his work – bold communicative gestures he says he is still getting his head around.
On the ground is the broken glass of one of his works. It didn’t fare so well in the trip down from Auckland, but he shrugs it off. The transient nature of his art is something he came to terms with a long time ago.
Bradley is also known as Haser, a graffiti artist who has risen from the grassroots beginnings of tagging his local West Auckland streets to becoming an artist whose works reside, not only on urban walls, but behind frames.
He got used to his work being destroyed, covered over and erased in those early days and it’s more the newly acquired permanence of his art that has got him thinking.
‘‘The biggest problem that I had for this show was how people would respond to it.
‘‘People think of me as street art and so then when people come and see it they might be expecting Banksy, realism, females. But it’s not. It’s just markings.’’
These markings have evolved over many years.
A recurring motive is in there, the rose that has morphed into a figurative being and confidence, confidence that Bradley says has come with time.
‘‘I stand by my work and it means more to me now. I feel like I have developed and blossomed as an artist. Picasso said that at 18 he could paint like all the masters, but it took a lifetime to learn how to paint like a child.’’
It’s a reversing back into intuition, while still bringing his street smarts to the walls. He started off tagging when he was about 11, more out of boredom than anything else. Bradley and a mate gathered up all their permanent markers, ‘‘after playing a bit of PlayStation and raiding the fridge’’, and took to their neighbourhood.
‘‘My radius was pretty tight. I’d go to school and back, maybe to the park, so I didn’t see a lot of graffiti, but when I did I was always really curious.’’
Bradley says that first experience was pretty cool.
Seeing his tag on a lamp post somehow meant he existed there. It wasn’t life-changing, he says, he didn’t have huge aspirations at that point, but on the cusp of becoming a teenager, he was definitely interested.
‘‘I was really confused about how to channel all this energy and graffiti started to really resonate with me.’’
He laughs when he says he was a product of his environment. ‘‘I fit the criteria, middle-to-lower class Ma¯ori kid, the perfect teenage tagger’’, but at first it was just ‘‘mucking around’’.
When he met up with an older kid from central Auckland who had experienced a lot more of the graffiti culture, Bradley got into it more seriously.
‘‘My fire just grew and grew and I decided that graffiti is what I wanted to do.
‘‘I wasn’t clear then about being an artist. I just knew that’s what I wanted to do in my spare time.’’
He left school at 16, something he regrets, but it did mean he had more time to do graffiti and draw.
He got taken into the fold within the graffiti community and met like-minded people who had the same ambitions he did.
‘‘Through all of that we just amplified ourselves and set up a really good graffiti collective.’’
He went and got a batchelor in design and visual arts and that’s where his path crossed with Burger Fuel, which was looking for a graphic designer. The job gave him some firm ground and after seven years, he says he has helped mould the brand into what it is today.
‘‘With that I’ve been able to support myself as an artist. I work for them four days a week and the rest of the time I work out of my studio. So yeah, rent gets paid and I can sustain myself as a person.’’
His art is his joy. He says he realised a few years ago he doesn’t have to make art to make money.
He stopped making works to impress people and instead, now, he makes it to impress himself.
His artworks have become more and more simple, less technical, less realistic. Bradley says they resonate more with him and they hold more meaning.
‘‘I have always been too worried about what people think, but now it’s more about documenting my visual process. It’s what’s going on in my brain.