Moxy Bristol, St Pauls

Moxy Hotel, St Paul’s, Bristol

Artists and Commissions

Jewels of St Paul’s by Lawrence Hoo and Charles Golding

The Artwork

The artists produced a mixed media piece set in the ground floor windows of the Moxy Bristol Hotel. Four jewelled shapes are cut into the windows, overlaid with a poem dedicated to St Paul’s and its people. Through the windows, a series of modular diamond shapes hang, cut from shards of printed Perspex to create a three dimensional sculpture featuring photography by Khali Ackford. As the viewer peers in, a combination of lights and mirrors reflect their own face back through the artwork, situating them in both St Paul’s and the artwork itself.

The artists also produced an audio accompaniment to the work, with recordings of interviews with local residents set alongside a reading of the poem. This can be found at www.jewelsofstpauls.co.uk

The gem symbol weaves through the piece, speaking to similarities in the ways both communities and precious jewels are forged through pressure over time. For St Paul’s, this compacting and layering of cultures has created a strong, nuanced and diverse community with many facets. The artwork invites reflection and approach from multiple perspectives, with return visits providing different experiences depending on lighting, angle and position of viewing, colour changes and different processes of refraction.

The Podcast Episode

Procession by Bo Lanyon

The Artwork

Bo Lanyon’s work explores an entangled landscape of experience. Influenced by both the history of expressionist painting & popular culture, paintings are built from layers of intense, gestural colour, as precise, illustrative elements hover in the foreground. Lanyon holds an MA from the Royal College of Art, has work in the Zabludowicz Collection and has received a number of awards from Arts Council England. Having been based in Bristol for a decade, Lanyon approached the commission excited to work on a piece that would explore the landscape of his adopted home city. 

Lanyon has created a large-scale painting to occupy the main lobby entrance wall that welcomes visitors to the hotel as soon as they enter. The piece is an explosion of colour and vibrancy, that pulls on images from St Paul’s Carnival as well as motifs from local built heritage. 

The artist worked alongside organisers of St Paul’s Carnival to source photography from across its decades of annual celebrations. The resulting painting draws on figurative shapes and key colours to evoke the atmosphere of the carnival procession, with layered areas of detail that become clearer the nearer you stand to the surface.

Good and then bad and then good again by Dr Myles-Jay Linton

The Artwork

Dr Myles-Jay Linton is a figurative artist and psychologist. Key themes in his work include the connection between our bodies and our emotions, and examining recent experiences of solitude/connection. He lives 5 minutes walk away from the hotel, and was excited to participate in the development of a new building in his immediate neighbourhood.

Linton has created a new neon artwork for the hotel lobby’s library area. The work began as a digital line drawing, and the artist partnered with sign makers Cabot Neon to turn it into a physical neon piece. It is designed to be bold, fun and inviting, to engage people who are staying in the hotel as well as draw passers by in from Newfoundland Street for a closer look.

The design of the work is typical of Linton’s practice, in that bold lines depict figures in motion. This particular piece attempts to make sense of the repetition of everyday life, and an invitation to look beyond the binary of good vs. bad. The use of figures in the design reflects a need to listen to our bodies and the messages they send us about how we are feeling. The three figures in the artwork evoke this visually, with repetitions of a line drawn figure rotating along the wall, each line glowing in pink, red and orange neon. 

The Podcast Episode

Untitled by Lucas Antics

Lucas Antics, also known as Alex Lucas, is a Bristol based illustrator, street artist & muralist. Her often dark, quirky, humorous designs can be seen painted on walls and buildings around the UK. With a love of graphic novels and raw art combined with influences as wide as Ralph Steadman (who she recently exhibited with), Gary Baseman & Egon Schiele, she has honed a unique and compelling style of her own.

Lucas Antics was commissioned to create artworks for the booth spaces in the ground floor bar area of the hotel. Their paintings were designed and created to honour members of the Windrush generation who settled in St Paul’s. Various flora, fauna and wildlife from the Caribbean have been woven through the imagery, as well as bright colour palettes inspired by the same.

BBC News article

“A selection of art installations celebrating a city’s cultural heritage have been created to “honour the local community. The newly opened Moxy hotel, in St Pauls, Bristol, showcases four pieces that focus on the local area’s history. Social enterprise Bricks Bristol commissioned a selected group of local artists to design the works.”

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Bristol 24/7 News article

“For public art producer at Bricks, the entire project has been able to elevate, and celebrate, voices and stories from the local community: We are thrilled that the artists involved are all Bristol-based, and that Moxy has been such a willing partner in creating a public art programme that reflects the local community and supports local creatives”.

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