Atma: Temple of Cultures
Temple of cultures is not simply the name of this piece, it is the whole ethos and fundamental starting point for the project. Atma expertly blends his super positive colourful explosions of artwork with community based projects all over the world, so as we were kindly offered this major wall on Tullie’s museum, known as ‘Carlisles home of culture’ we had to bring him onboard.
The project started with Atma hosting 4 days of workshops with asylum seekers where he brought out the concept of investigating patterns from their cultures. With participants from Eritrea, Iran, Iraq, Ukraine, Portugal, Spain, Taiwan, Ethiopia and the UK the depth of what came out of these sessions was so rich.
Atma then spend days directly interpreting and layering these patterns into the design. Within hours of this happening he was in the lift gridding up the wall and sketching out the plan.
Atma is a brush artist who uses bright bold colours of masonry paint. This wall was 130m2 so a big task for one man. He was very pleased to have help from local wall painter Martin Evans (see his work here) and many other helping hands along the way. The workshops were not the only part the attendees played and Atma hosted nearly 30 of them to actually help paint the lower sections of the wall which was a really rich and engaging part of this whole project.
Whether you know the back story or not, this whole joyful piece can either function as a wonderfully positive feast for the eyes or a story of true community engagement and a coming together of cultures.
Thanks to everyone who helped make their mark on this wonderful celebration of design, cultural public art and freedom of expression.
The documentary by filmmaker Adam Reid will be launched in June 2023 and will be on our YouTube channel soon.
This wall was made possible by
