Street art with a message
For the last five years, murals of threatened and endangered birds have been appearing on buildings around London. Street artist ATM explains just what he wants his art to achieve
Murals of birds and wildlife not only brighten an area, they come with a conservation message, too
Look Mummy, it’s a bear!” It’s not something you hear often on the streets of Bristol, but it’s a bear sure enough, leading its cubs along the city’s Clift House Road. At least it will be when the artist has put the finishing touches to this eight-foot high mural. As the car pulls away from the traffic lights, with the little boy leaning out the passenger window, the man with the paint brush darts across the road to check on his creation. “At this stage, I need to make sure I’m getting the perspective and proportions right,” he explains. “I want the image to have balance and a real sense of momentum.”
ATM was one of 400 artists who took part in Bristol’s Upfest, the biggest street art festival in Europe. Huge murals, many featuring cultural icons as diverse as Lisa Simpson and Frida Kahlo, went up all over the city, but ATM’S work has its focus firmly on conservation. “Go back a thousand years and there would have been bears roaming around Britain, but no-one’s pulling their hair out that they aren’t here anymore,” he says. “I want to get people thinking about why that’s the case.” And people do stop to chat and watch as he paints the heavy fur hanging from the mother bear, with a brush taped to the end of a long decorator’s pole.
Street art with a conservation message, he says, has the power to engage a new audience: “We need imagery in places like shopping centres, paintings of endangered birds in urban settings. “My work isn’t preaching to the converted; I’m talking to people who may have little idea about wildlife. “I was painting a Chaffinch at Loughborough Junction and these kids said: “What’s that, a Kingfisher?” and that was my opportunity to talk about it. Later that day, two blokes drove past in their work van and shouted “Nice Chaffinch, mate!” and that really surprised me.” He pulls out his mobile phone and swipes to a photo of the bird. “You can see that it’s now been tagged all the way round by local graffiti artists, but they’ve left the bird untouched,” he says. “There’s a rhythm to it: the bird has become part of its urban environment.”
How it began
His first avian mural of a Snipe, five years ago, showed buildings could be a surprisingly forgiving canvas. “I never thought I’d be able to paint the birds quick enough to make it feasible on that scale. “With a small painting every millimetre is