Urban Art goes rural with Upfest and the National Trust

For those of you that follow Upfest's activity closely through social media you will be fully aware that our production team have been doing something very odd for the last month... Yes Upfest and a commissioned group of artists have been painting in the middle of a field!

Croombe Court

With the Upfest production crew playing key roles in large scale public artworks such as See No Evil and obviously our own annual super festival here in Bristol, painting 50m tall buildings has become something of a day job for most of us, little did we think twelve months ago we would start working with the National Trust on a UK first, taking Street Art to the heart of the British country side.

For the last month Upfest temporarily moved home to Croome Court, a mid 18th century Neo-Palladian mansion surrounded by an extensive landscaped parkland near Pershore in south Worcestershire. The mansion, and park, were designed by Lancelot "Capability" Brown with some of the internal rooms designed by Robert Adam.

National Trust

Understandably the National Trust weren't to keen on a full on street art production directly on to the surface of one of the UK's most distinguished properties, luckily for us they were ahead of the game on this and with a huge scaffold structure in the pipeline we had the perfect opportunity to experiment and test the ideal solution to temporarily in case this country side gem and bring some further impact to the project known as Croome Redefined.

Tom Bennett, Creative Director at Croome explained; 'The National Trust is pleased to working with the Upfest production crew and welcome emerging artists to Croome, part of the wider Heritage Lottery funded project to repair and share Croome Court. Engaging new talent is one of the many ways in which Croome is doing things differently to redefine the role of the country mansion house for today’s society.'

Cheo

Upfest is very pleased to have been working alongside some amazing artists on this project including lead artist Cheo with Andrew Colwill, Miss Wah, My Dog Sighs and Silent Hobo.

To find out more and to make plans to visit this 8th wonder of the English countryside check out Croome on the web, if you have a project or building and would like the Upfest production team to help make it a reality then please email Stephen@upfest.co.uk, no job is to big or crazy, actually we thrive on such challenges!