A PLATFORM_ X Kid Acne Street Art Collab
Build to Rent developer PLATFORM_ has recently collaborated with renowned international street artist Kid Acne to create a major new landmark for Leeds. The art installation will transform the historic Commercial Inn in the heart of Sweetfields, a significant new 1.3 million sqft neighbourhood in Leeds' South Bank.
Spearheading the international Street Art movement, Yorkshire-based Kid Acne has exhibited large-scale artworks across the globe for over twenty years, from Rome and Los Angeles to Beijing and Paris.
A new landmark for the city, the mural is an important addition to the city's cultural scene.
Kid Acne explains: “The mural covers two elevations of The Commercial Inn. The building has a lot of obstacles, which I tried to feed into the composition breakdown to make a lot of those things disappear. When I’m painting on a big scale like this mural, I really try to keep that energy and rawness of the original sketch – that’s the hardest bit.”
“The piece marks a tide change for the area – the start of something new and different. All these northern cities, like Leeds, Manchester and Sheffield, are just an hour apart, and there’s a network of artists across them all. For me, projects like this really help to bridge that gap a little more.”
The artwork depicts Kid Acne’s signature ‘spirit animal’ characters, and the words ‘Positive energy activates constant elevation’ run across the mural, which the street artist hopes will resonate with the audience.
“These characters go back to mid-90s. Stylistically, they come from my drawings as a kid, and the headdresses are inspired by Maurice Sendak’s ‘Where The Wild Things Are’. The kids in animal costumes are a way to show different emotions and different temperaments. Each individual character is the size of one of my regular pieces that I paint, so to have that many in a row on the side of The Commercial Inn is really cool. It’s like an army of different personalities from different walks of life.”
Kid Acne’s mural will occupy the northeast corner of the Sweetfields site and the façade of The Commercial Inn for approximately two years. The Commercial Inn was built between 1831 and 1844 and was the first headquarters of the ASLEF railway union. It was previously owned by Leeds United icon Peter Lorimer.
Ed Bradbury (b. Malawi, 1978) is a painter, printmaker, illustrator and emcee known professionally as Kid Acne.
His formative years were spent writing graffiti, self-publishing fanzines, and making experimental hip-hop – invariably illustrating and printing the record sleeves by hand. The culmination of these interests informed the development of his own unique aesthetic, which he’s translated into innumerable graphics, product designs, installations, animations and silkscreen editions.
A stalwart of the international street art movement, over the past two decades, Kid Acne has painted large-scale murals across continents and has exhibited extensively in museums and galleries from Beijing to Paris. His art explores a variety of themes, including typography, fantasy, mythology and architecture. His work has adorned campaigns for some of the world’s leading brands, whilst the man himself continues to paint epic slogans on the backstreets of Sheffield.
PLATFORM_ is an award-winning investor, developer, operator and asset manager of institutional-quality rental communities across the UK, with a delivered portfolio and pipeline of 4,200 apartments across 12 UK towns and cities. Taking a local approach at all its developments, PLATFORM_ targets that 25% of the businesses it works with at Sweetfields will be Leeds-based. PLATFORM_ is also targeting all its buildings, including Sweetfields, being net zero in operation by 2030. For further information on Sweetfields, please visit www.sweetfields.co.uk.