Day seven - Street art

Read Luke 19: 37-40

I have a love of Street Art. When all the galleries and Museums were shut in Spring last year, I took long walks to discover the murals around the city. I love how you can turn a street corner and find something astonishing that you don’t have to purchase a ticket to see. I know some people call it vandalism, but I love how artists find space in the margins of our often sterile or commercial urban landscapes to make us think, laugh or lament. As Banksy puts it;

The people who truly deface our neighbourhoods are the companies that scrawl their giant slogans across buildings and buses trying to make us feel inadequate unless we buy their stuff. They expect to shout their message in your face from every available surface but you are never allowed to answer back. Well, they started this fight, and the wall is a weapon of choice to hit them back. (Banksy, Banksy, 2005, 8–9)

Street Art can be raw and raucous and it can be unsettling. Instead of accepting the way the world is, Street Art either celebrates its locality without shame, protests against the status-quo or offers fantastical alternatives. In this, it has much in common with the prophets of the Hebrew Bible. Street Art is messy, undomesticated and counter-cultural. I want to ask ‘but isn’t that where Christ is often found? If you wandered around an urban centre near you, I wonder what the Street Art would say? Would you be open to hearing it? Jason Goroncy, a lecturer in divinity with an interest in Street Art, suggests that it is ‘public theology’ where you can find fragments of religious symbolism which have survived in the cultural memory recycled and spoken again. Friends, when so many people feel silenced, the stones are speaking. While Christianity may not be the national voice it once was, in difficult and sometimes shocking re-interpretations, the stones are speaking.

The photographs here are from Kelham Island in Sheffield. One includes a mural of local musician Jarvis Cocker on the side of a pub. You can view it across the river where bullrushes grow. I had Pulp’s hit ‘Common People’ and the story of Moses playing in my head. Who is common? Who is chosen? Who do we want to be? May the Street Art near you be a source of inspiration.

Suzanne Nockels

Photographs by Suzanne Nockels

See https://cruciality.files.wordpress.com/2020/03/goroncy-on-the-gifts-of-street-art-zadok.pdf