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In the studio with Ab Rogers Design
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British artist Marc Craig is driven by a passion for collaboration
Of course, I love doing my own thing, but when you work with others, regardless of who they are or what they do, the work feels somehow upgraded. It’s inspiring
Craig tells Meanwhile. Craig, who is best known for his large-scale urban murals rendered in a playful doodle-like style, is no stranger to joining forces with others. In January of this year, he launched Leake Street Galleries, a project that supports artists working in the urban landscape; he is currently the artist in residence at Leake Street Arches, a renowned graffiti tunnel in London’s Lambeth area that he has long contributed to; and he is regularly called upon by brands to lend his talents to creative projects and campaigns.
Having teamed up with Meanwhile once before, adorning a Scape space with an interior mural, he was the obvious choice when it came to seeking out an artist to decorate the temporary hoarding surrounding Scape Canada Water’s student accommodation, which is currently undergoing building work. “The brief was open, but Scape asked me if there was any way to involve local schools, and I had an idea,” he recalls of the artwork’s origins.
It’s a great example of the joy you can find in working with others.
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For some time, Craig has been experimenting with Artificial Intelligence software, finding ways to incorporate AI-generated images into his practice, and this project, he realised, offered a great opportunity to do something in this arena. “I suddenly had this vision of a local school creating AI robots and aliens. It’s a classic kid combo and a great way to gather multiple images fast,” he enthuses.
He approached the nearby Rotherhithe Primary School, who eagerly took him up on his offer of collaborating – on a vast scale. “300 people are involved in the mural,” he laughs. “Pupils, teaching staff, support staff and even the head teacher.” With the green light given, Craig then set about collating his robots and aliens. “I went in and talked with the pupils and explained what they were going to do, which was choose an alien or a robot, and one of four emotions – happy, sad, excited or grumpy,” he says, adopting a grumpy voice and dejected expression. “I said it like that, and a lot of them chose grumpy for some reason!”
He then used DALL-E, an AI model that generates images and artworks based on input language descriptions, to give their otherworldly beings form. “I used the prompts ‘street art character’, then ‘alien’ or ‘robot’, and then the emotion. Once you’ve entered your prompt, DALL-E produces four images, and I asked the student or staff member to pick the character they liked best.”
Armed with these templates, he set about creating the mural on two 40-metre-long hoardings at Scape Canada Water. “I needed to work quite quickly, and it was in the middle of the cold snap and the constant train strikes, so that was the main challenge, actually,” he says with a chuckle. “But luckily I work best spontaneously, so I connected with the wall and started mapping out the characters with spray, translating them into my style.”
On one stretch of hoarding, Craig bunched the aliens and robots together in a bustling group, while on the other he spaced them out, free to roam. “It's nice to have that rhythm and nuance in the picture, so there's variety in there,” he expands. After that, it was a question of adding the colours and creating the figures’ black outlines with “a big chunky Posca pen."
The result is a wonderfully vibrant and uplifting artwork in which a colourful cast of flailing-armed, wide-eyed aliens and robots clamour for attention (and to spark a smile) – something they’ve certainly achieved. “What’s amazing about street art is that you can communicate with passers-by while you’re doing it,” Craig says. “About halfway through the process, the students living in Scape Canada Water started to interact with me, showing their appreciation for what I was doing and stopping to say hello.” And how about the response from his Rotherhithe Primary School collaborators? “They loved it! They had fun doing the DALL-E part, but they loved it even more when they saw the finished thing.”
Happily, although intended as a temporary installation, the mural will have a future as part of the building it currently enlivens. “The hope is that some of the panels will be cut from it and will hang inside the space,” the artist explains. “It’s a great example of the joy you can find in working with others.”
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