Moxy Bristol, Various Artists

Moxy Hotels are renowned for collaborating with artists to bring each of their experiential hotels to life. This hotel embraced their location with a range of connected artworks, forming an art-scheme that nods to the famed creative culture which adorns the street, underpasses, back-alleys and bridges of Bristol. Numerous commissioned pieces greet guests across the walls, workstations and lockers, with some depicting iconic Bristol landmarks as well as local Bristolian sayings. Locals and guests of the hotel can find out more by using a QR code that is placed on each piece, giving more information on the individual installations and the artist.

Jewels of St Paul’s

Hoo and Golding 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 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 positionality of viewing, colour changes and different processes of refraction.

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

Procession

Lanyon 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

Linton 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 signmakers 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.

Untitled (Lucas Antics)

Lucas Antics created artworks for the booth spaces in the ground floor bar area of the hotel. The paintings were designed 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.