Art en route: Alfie Dennen’s bus tops for all

Alfie Dennen Photo licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution ShareAlike 3.0

What gave you the initial idea to begin your bus-top project?

It wasn’t any one thing, aside perhaps from the inspiration taken from other artists’ use of bus shelters.

Other artists in Hackney have done things like place a series of beautifully coloured potatoes skewered with toothpicks on bus stop roofs across the 243 bus route.

Another has placed heart shaped turfs of grass on them.

For me the inspiration really came from looking at these drab and unused pseudo-public spaces and imagining what we could turn them into.

Can you explain how it will work?

Once the panels are installed, anyone who comes to the website will be able to select either one bus-top or many and create artwork or text for it.

There will be a set of drawing and text tools online and once they have finished their work it then gets submitted to the site and is open to the community at the site to look at.

The community itself then votes work up or down, with the best work for any particular bus-top then being sent to the panel at whichever bus tops the artist has decided to use.

The key thing here is that we are hoping to completely democratise what work gets seen on the installations, and remind people that everyone is creative, everyone is an artist if they want to be, all it takes is the desire to create.

Have any famous artists agreed to contribute their work?

At the moment we are developing the project after having been awarded a small grant from the Arts Council Artists Taking the Lead fund, and so are still doing outreach to Artists and Art organisations.

Working with famous artists will be just one element of the work, what I am most excited about is to be working with what we are calling the ‘Art Public’ – everyone who is inspired enough by the project to create work for it.

How long do you hope the project will go on for?

At the very least it will run until the end of the Olympic Games, however we are already speaking with organisations that may provide the resources necessary to keep the installations in place well beyond this time, providing a lasting legacy for Londoners.

Are you concerned about possible vandalism?

Of course. As part of our engineering and design phase, anti-vandalism elements will be a core part of the design from the very beginning.

Who are you hoping will benefit from the project?

We see the project as a way of bringing together schools, community groups and individuals throughout London, uniting us all in a common wonder at the creativity in all of us.

So I hope that the lasting benefit, the legacy of the project, is to inspire wonder in Londoners and London’s visitors.

More on Alfie Dennen’s Bus Tops here.

More on public art here.

Alfie Dennen's bus tops