Noted street artist Anna Wheelhouse finds an unusual and very creative application for a signage and graphics staple…

Murals have a legitimate claim to numbering among the first media with pretensions toward satisfying a need for signage. They’ve been around for much longer however than the need to advertise, direct or inform even existed. Given a blank expanse of anything, there’s a hard-coded instinct in our species to fill it with something, protect it or simply enjoy it. In doing so, some marvellous works have arisen through the ages.

Making its claim and getting noticed more recently is a work that now overlooks a piece of the manmade landscape in Nottingham, in Beeston to be a little more exact. It’s a work by noted local street artist Anna Wheelhouse and it brings a nucleus of local references to a building that’s undergoing a rebirth in purpose and a changed aesthetic.

Anna was commissioned by the building’s acquirers, William May Holdings, to provision the work in the interests of bringing a bit of life to what was generally thought of as being a dated and purposeless facade. Anna’s design does just that and manages to bring numerous local references into the visual conversation. 

The building’s aspect, proportions, and details fold around Anna’s design well and engage with the observer by presenting stacks of casually arranged books on ‘shelves.’ Art will always provoke reaction and in this case it’ll be heads tipped to one side to read the titles on spines in some kind of mass-outbreak of human curiosity. The art works at that level of detail and in the macro-scale - it’s a welcome scribble of colour punctuating the local horizon.

With the emphasis on local content, and the building owner’s mission to bring local businesses into the venue, Anna’s work has commercial purpose but could stand alone if it had to promoting the sentiment and content it embodies. Its design and production traces entirely to Anna’s female art studio, Bentinck Studios in Radford, and it took Anna and the women who work there about three weeks to paint. She involved a little support from some local graphic artists to deal with the building’s windows.

The Quadrant building presents a great canvas but is nonetheless a working venue with people inside it whose human comfort needed to be considered. Closing down the view out of the venue by covering its windows wasn’t an option and interrupting the canvas by leaving the window ‘blank’ wasn’t attractive either. Metamark’s Clear Vision window perf was proposed as a solution, tested and given the go-ahead.

Metamark Clear Vision, or ‘perf’ as it’s more commonly known among signs and graphics producers, doesn’t figure in a typical artist’s toolbox or vocabulary. It comprises a laminated construction of print-receptive material that’s black on one of its two sides and white on the other. The black side of the material is supplied coated with a pressure sensitive adhesive and the whole construction is perforated front to back with strategically arranged holes. From any distance beyond three feet or so, the material looks solid from the white side and see-through from the black. 

Anna and her team worked elements of the mural’s design on the Metamark Clear Vision on site for completion at the studio. The Clear Vision was spray painted with the artist’s medium of choice and then applied on site over the building’s windows and into the midst of the mural’s other detail and content. It works brilliantly. Observers from outside the building perceive a continuous solid surface upon which the mural is painted, those on the inside have a clear view out.

The mural has proved to be something of a hit locally and attracted a great deal of professional and casual interest. More murals are planned, and Anna’s signature is now an enduring part of the county’s skyline. We’ll report future installations as they happen and congratulate Anna and her team for discovering a novel solution that’s liberated a lot of further creative potential.