The Monday morning after the brilliant weekend before, Wicked hangover? Always is on the Monday after the week before, it was certainly colourful this weekend over at Hackney Wick and as art festivals go Hackney WickED is rather uniquely organic. A beautifully cocktail or curated events, consider spaces, formal presentations alongside impromptu explosions of performance, creativity and just the right amount of artistic anarchy. It isn’t anarchy though, the sixth annual weekend event takes months of planning, coordinating, curating (and rightfully this year, for the first time, a little bit of Arts Council funding for some of the more formal events). A real sense of artists coming together and doing it themselves, a sense of artistic danger, a feel that it can be done, that the white cube system can’t control everything and that if you really want it, this is where you find it. This is not an attempt to review the weekend, this is not around up of events, there were far too many to even think of doing that this Monday morning (but hey, if anyone wants to submit any photos they might have take we might try and pull something together in terms of a visual record in a day or two).

The weather was excellent, save for a dramatic downpour that soaked those of us who were up preparing things, dropping art and such early on on the Saturday morning. Indeed my first Saturday morning visit was pretty much shared with no one but the foxes and swans, the real calm before the artistic storm. What was I doing up at 6am with the foxes? On my bike with a heavy back pack, dropping off the first of the Fifth One Hundred Pieced pieces around the wick.

For the last Month or so I have been pulling together the fifth in a series of One Hundred Pieced Pieces, this time painting on one hundred found pieces, one hundred unwanted things – pieces of wood picked up off the street, unwanted painted canvases retrieved from the bins of art studios, old doors dumped on the pavement, an smashed plinth thrown on to Vyner Street, worn out skateboard decks… Things all painted, leaves and growth added and painted ready to go back out on to the streets they came from. All numbered and labeled 9and yes you can see hearts if you want, hearts, leaves, leafhearts, the choice is yours, no interpretation is right or wrong). Some of them to Hackney Wick for the WickED weekend and some back on to the streets of East London. Originally it was to be all one hundred at Hackney Wicked, as the weekend evolved so did the plan, for the best laid plans always evolve, fifty to the Wick to birth the drop and fifth more around the streets, canals, walls and pub signs of East London during August, keep an eye out around the canal, Redchurch Street, Vyner Street, Hackney Road and such…. Hackney Wicked was a pleasure, a shared pleasure…. people twittering about their finds and Facebooking their photos, sharing the pieces, i guess some of them found their way in to the bins of the clean up teams at the end but that’s where they were to start with so nothing lost, a few unwanted things given new life. I enjoyed my part in the Hackney WickED weekend, on we go throughout August with the recycling and releasing of the Fifth One Hundred Pieced Piece… . (SW)

Lots more vital information, imagery and the whys and wheres and how you find things and more more more over there via www.hackneywicked.co.uk

Please click on an image to enlarge or run the slide show….