That grand, visually assaulting retaining wall behind the Trafalgar Square on Cardigan Street is going plaid.
In recent times, the roughly 100-metre long, four-metre high wall was the receptacle for a chaotic assortment of what many found to be vulgar and discriminatory graffiti. Pedestrians were complaining about what they called offensive content and a visual eyesore.
But work has progressed in recent days over most of the structure’s surface to cover what was there, first with a coat of white primer, then with a dark brown undercoating, followed by a crisscross plaid pattern.
Not all of the wall has been whited out. The front section of it, closest to Eramosa Road, has a bright work of mural art done in the past by children and youth. It has been left untouched.
The plaid pattern is quickly covering the rest of the surface. However, one section that only has the brown undercoating has already been tagged with graffiti.
Sian Matwey is a local community activist who oversees the group Murals of Hope project. She recently noticed the wall was undergoing a paint job, and was disappointed to see that the work was being done by a crew of commercial painters and not by a group of artists. She is not thrilled by the pattern either.
“I’m disappointed that it’s plaid,” she said in a telephone interview Wednesday morning. “There are so many very talented artists in Guelph. It’s too bad they couldn’t have done something more artistic with the wall.”
She said there was talk last year of assembling a number of artists and carrying out a large-scale mural project on the wall. But the plan didn’t materialize due to timing issues. She said the wall was like a blank canvas with lots of artistic potential.
Matwey hopes the front section of the wall done by young people will remain. It appears the priming stage of the work has stopped at the mural, leaving it intact.
The wall runs along the railroad tracks and the Speed River on the edge of the downtown, between Eramosa Road and Goldie Mill Park. Before it was painted over it held images and text that were racist and homophobic, as well as sexually violent in nature. Many wanted the owner of the wall, Homestead Land Holding Ltd of London, ON., to cover the wall. It appears the company got the message.
The wall has long been used by graffiti artists to experiment with public art that makes a statement or beautifies the rather monotonous concrete surface.
There has been a desire of late in the city to beautify the urban landscape by getting rid of graffiti. In late June, a group sponsored by Dulux Paints on Speedvale Avenue set out to paint over graffiti on privately owned buildings and structures in a number of city locations.
