Art or Scars?

My house is near a laneway in downtown Toronto. When COVID shrank my world to wandering close to home, I began to take a closer look at these laneway spaces. I wondered how—or if—graffiti makes the laneways more interesting or if the graffiti simply is nothing but the wanton destruction of private property.

Beginning this new project, I asked myself, “What is street art and what is graffiti and are the two related?” The general idea is that street art is commissioned and paid for by the property owner. Graffiti is a more random affair, usually made without the owner’s permission. However, in terms of value of work, some graffiti artists have become world famous for their powerful images and are part of city tours and movie sets, such as Graffiti Alley in Toronto. In Toronto, property owners are fined for not removing the graffiti on their building: a bylaw not uniformly enforced. I realized that in my walks around my alleyways, I was developing a point of view. Where some people saw any graffiti as an eyesore, I saw some graffiti marks as humorous, and/or interesting, and some, I thought, had no merit. How could I translate this idea into a rug hooking project? How would the soft surfaces of luxurious yarns and wool depict the hard graffiti walls and subject matter? It seemed an unlikely pairing. And thus, I embarked on a two-year rug hooking journey to answer these questions for myself.