Off the Wall: Street Art on Kampa Island

This Summer I was delighted to attend my first street art festival!!! Off The Wall at Kampa Island in Prague is a new street art festival, with the zero edition in 2022. In the Spring one of the Lewisham School of Muralism alums got an email inviting the grads to apply for the festival. A few of us gave it a shot and in the end four of us (Lucia, Sion and Veronica) were accepted, though Lucia could make it in the end.

Sion, Vero and I flew out to Prague on the Thursday night and got settled in a hostel on Kampa Island, part of the historic town centre. We weren’t sure how big the festival was going to be, but we were delighted on the Friday morning to find special wall-mounted canvases had been prepped for us along the Vltava riverbank and that there was an opening ceremony with the mayor of Prague!

After a quick scramble to find the right paints we got to work, Sion & Vero were on the riverbank side and I was around the corner facing the Kampa Museum. I was very lucky to be joined by some fantastic artists on my strip, Marcus ‘Gomad’ Debie and his wife Nancy, Ondřej ‘Mio’ Michálek and Martin Gelnar. Since we had three days to finish, I managed to keep the panic over finishing at bay, and had a chance to chat with the other artists, and learn more about spray-painting in a weekend than I had the whole previous year! There were a few good night’s out as well, taking advantage of a very favourable exchange rate on Czech beer!

A huge thank you to the Off the Wall team, particularly Robert, Radek and Stefan. It was so nice to be treated as an artist! We had fantastic food cooked on-site at the riverbank there times a day, a nice safe place to stash our things and great support painting, including some nifty impromptu shelters to protect from the rain. The only downside was I had to be back in London on Tuesday, so we flew out Monday morning and didn’t have much time to explore the city! Luckily Stefan had prepared a treat and brought us out on the Vltava to see the city from his boat!

The theme of the zero edition of the festival was Freedom. My piece was called ‘Generations of Freedom’, from a poem called "‘We Saw a Vision” by Liam Mac Uistin.

The Irish reads ‘A ghlúnta na saoirse cuimhnígí orainne, glúnta na haislinge.’
It translates as ‘O generations of freedom remember us, the generation of vision’.

It’s the closing lines of an ‘Aisling’ or ‘Vision’ poem about the struggle for Irish Independence and is inscribed in the Garden of Remembrance in Dublin. I chose the words to commemorate this year’s 100 year anniversary of the foundation of the Irish Free State. It was a real honour to share this expression of Irish cultural heritage with the people of Prague. I hope we get a chance to go back and paint again in 2023!

Shout out to all the Off the Wall artists and organising team, and to Jana Jelínková for the professional pics!