LOUD, MESSY, POLITICAL, UNAPOLOGETIC, ANONYMOUS OR NOT 🔥🎨 We were looking for the rule-breakers, the wall-scribblers, the midnight painters, the poets with paint on their fingers—this one’s for you.
This issue is diving headfirst into the world of graffiti, street art, and public rebellion.
We sought art that shouts, writing that provokes, and ideas that can’t be caged - whether you’re tagging underpasses, turning walls into protest, or scribbling resistance on a napkin.
Graffiti didn’t start in the ’70s, it’s been around since humans figured out how to leave a mark.
From ancient Roman walls scrawled with political insults and crude jokes to Pompeii’s public declarations of love and shade, graffiti has always been about voice, resistance, and raw expression.
Fast-forward to 1970s New York City, where modern graffiti exploded from subway cars and crumbling brick walls.
Young people, mostly from marginalised communities, turned the city into their canvas, tagging names, claiming space, telling stories no one else would publish.
Graffiti became a way to exist loudly in a society that often ignored or erased them.
By the ’80s, graffiti was criminalised and commercialised. While police cracked down, galleries started cashing in.
Artists like Jean-Michel Basquiat and Keith Haring bridged the street and the studio, but the core of graffiti stayed rooted in freedom, rebellion, and visibility.
Today, graffiti lives everywhere, from global art fairs to back alleys. It’s political, personal, poetic, and still illegal in most places. That’s part of its power.
It resists ownership. It speaks when nothing else can. It’s art for the people, raw, fast, and unfiltered.
So whether you're spraying protest on a boarded-up shopfront, writing love notes on lamp posts, or making zines in your bedroom, you’re part of this legacy.
This is your space to go raw, loud, political, personal, funny, furious, fearless.
No white cubes. No gallery rules. Just pure, unfiltered expression.
Artist: Boo’21 Custom Artwork
Description: Bubblegum Girl x is an original design created to depict bold and vibrant colours while pushing the boundaries of what is recognised as art. This design is available as a limited edition print but is now also featured on my collaboration with Pepita coffee and Fatboy Slim on their limited edition collector coffee tins that are sold in galleries, shops and cafes in the UK.
Artist: Susan Plover
Description: Found on a bathroom door at my local park. Someone had etched, burned, and painted, with lipstick smudges...
Call it pareidolia, maybe, but this image made me stop... to examine the marks and take away the work as an image on my mobile phone. In my mind, I was framing the image as a piece — a portrait?
Artist: Chris Lewis
I am a goldsmith/diamond setter with a background in street art and graffiti. In the world I grew up in, graffiti was everywhere — on walls, trains, underpasses. But in the world of luxury I find myself surrounded in, it's overlooked.
With this project, I set out to change that.
What if we took the most rebellious, expressive letterforms in the world...and set them with thousands of diamonds?
What if we honoured street culture with fine jewellery craftsmanship - CAD, casting, polishing, micro-setting by hand?
Well that’s exactly what I’ve done with my most recent collection, these are not commissions they are art pieces designed to be displayed in galleries, but worn if necessary, these are all in collaboration with graffiti writers from across the Europe.
Artist: Joe Foster & Sean Azzopardi
Description: A collaborative tag from 2022 during the period of increased industrial action taken across the U.K., and was made directly opposite Royal Mail's Hull central delivery office. With 'Your Government Hates You!' Azzopardi drives at the heart of political rhetoric and decision making with dark humour. The use of the possessive pronoun cleverly flips the 'us' and 'them' trope of modern politics and reminds us that the real hate is between us and ourselves. 'Tracked 24/7' was created by me, Joe Foster, under the moniker 'Post-Person'. The tag is a subtly altered tracked package label (Royal Mail's Tracked 24 service). I worked for Royal Mail at the time, and they were implementing stronger tracking tools and devices for postal workers - something that feels familiar across every industry and in our personal lives too. The weaponisation of tracking tools on workers makes them increasingly robotic in their work and less human, with no room for humour, a faster pace, and no margin for error. 'Post-Person' was a play on the official job title (which is 'Post Person') and what era I felt we had entered - we are no longer allowed to be human, only entities that facilitate profit-making. The piece was made as a cathartic release of the feelings we were having.
Artist: Adrian Riley
Description: A tiny text artwork every five days observing and naming a 'microseason' in the life of the seaside town of Scarborough. Inspired by a Japanese tradition.
The Japanese tradition of ‘microseasons’ divides the year into 24 smaller seasons, each containing three microseasons with descriptive names based on observing natural events that happen in that country. I have been placing tiny text artworks around Scarborough, recording its own unique seaside micro seasons. Observing the changing natural environment, noting residents’ habits, and marking events in the town’s coastal economy, I seek to put a name to these uniquely Scarborough moments, which often arrive without anyone really taking notice... unless you spot one of these.
Artist: Jess Wright
Description: Rosa Parks said, 'I have learned over the years that when one's mind is made up, this diminishes fear; knowing what must be done does away with fear. Buildings hold the secrets of generations who lived in fear, who planned and plotted and faced a multitude of oppression and terror. Each story is built into the fabric of the building, creating layers of narrative that is waiting to be uncovered. Le génie de la Bastille shows a snap shot in time from a room on Rue de Charonne, Paris.
Artist name: Niita E.
Description: This is an exploration of graffiti through both photography and digital collage. It includes images from my photographic series Shoreditch Frames, which captures the raw, layered chaos of London’s graffiti-covered backstreets, framed through my lens into moments of structured chaos or meaning. The second part features collage works from my project Colonial Spell, which explores post-colonial identity by juxtaposing archival photographs from the Namibian National Archives Library with my own images of Shoreditch’s street graffiti. The aim is to weave these disparate elements into a cohesive narrative that reflects on decolonisation, cultural arbitrage, and identity.
The deliberate juxtaposition of London's chaotic, graffiti-laden backstreets with the historical context of Africa's colonisation serves as a visual metaphor for the complex dialogue between past and present. While the street artists may not have consciously engaged with themes of decolonisation or empire, their work nonetheless intersects with the broader post-colonial discourse. Through this series, I aim to engage viewers in a reflective examination of the silent assumptions that guide our social interactions and cultural understanding. By bringing to light the hidden threads connecting colonial history with contemporary urban expression, the work opens space for dialogue around identity, history, and the ongoing process of decolonisation.
Artist: Sarp Rüzgar Atila
Description: "Sticky Traces" is a personal reflection on sticker art as a form of graffiti and everyday resistance. I explore how my own sticker practice, shaped by experiences in cities like Istanbul, Amsterdam, Paris, Munchen and more, grew from playful self-expression into a way of reclaiming public space. Stickers, though small and often overlooked, carry political and emotional weight; they act as micropolitical tools that speak to identity, critique, humour, and presence. I created this piece to show how even the tiniest act, placing a sticker, can be an assertion of existence in a world that often tries to silence or erase us.
Artist: Sally Spinks
Description: Using coded messages is important to my artistic practice and in this piece I wanted to mimic the coded nature of graffiti. Often only known to others who know, tags can be meaningless to others. I produced hand and machine knitted pieces of graffiti depicting code from knitting patterns so only other knitters would recognise the meaning. These were then placed over graffiti at the South Bank and photographed.