Curator's Notes
Ducks today, gone tomorrow. Does preserving street art defeat the purpose of street art? Probably.
Does art have to be permanent to have value? Absolutely not.
Do I miss the cartoon ducks that were on this wall when I collected the paint flakes back in 2024? Yes.
Their names were Mikey, Gus, and Hieronymus. Their crazed eyes were a landmark in the Northern Quarter, a reminder that you were somewhere between someplace and some-other-place, with your back to the multi-storey car park. But now they are gone. Replaced by, at time of writing (2026- it’s been a while), some other crazed eyes by a different artist.
And so these paint flakes capture the ephemeral. They represent all on this wall that has been and gone. Planned urban street art is one of the most the most deliberate and considered manifestations of the “city as a palimpsest” idea [palimpsest——> comes from a Greek word meaning “scraped again”; a palimpsest is a manuscript where the text has been erased so it can be reused]. It is an example of the constant changes that happen around us, whether we notice them or not: the everyday flux, now in a glass jar with a lid on it.
But this also represents something else: the transition of spray paint from “graffiti” to “street art”; the, probably controversial, quote: “artists are the stormtroopers of gentrification” [quote from Montreal graffiti, 1987- according to the Toronto Arts Council]. So much meaning in stuff that just flaked off a wall, like bits of urban skin.
Because a little bit of paint on walls in pretty patterns can do a lot of things. Street art is graffiti made acceptable. It influences pedestrian behaviour, creates environments that are visually engaging and welcoming; it connects people to their space and encourages reflections on culture and identity [depending on the art- what does a duck bottom say to you about Manchester?].
But graffiti, well that’s apparently another thing. More scrawled, less controlled, more chaotic. Full of symbols that hint at a deeper urban world by invoking unseen presences; ghostly figures in a liminal space between the visibility they clearly crave when they use their tag, and the invisibility that grants them power.
Ultimately the lines between street art, graffiti, tagging, writing, and political and other slogans are blurry and controversial. Under what conditions should/could/can street art be criminalised? What does it mean that street art has moved from always subversive to often permissible? Does granting consent to street art take away its je ne sais quoi?
Answers to all of these on the back of a [duck based] postcard please.
