Adelaide street artists launch marriage equality project

art

Adelaide street artists launch marriage equality project

Words by Walter Marsh August 12, 2015

Two Adelaide artists are adding some colour the streets of Australia to help give the campaign for marriage equality an extra nudge. Tooth & Nail print maker Jake Holmes and prolific paste up artist Peter Drew have launched a new poster design with a simple and culturally resonant message: C’mon Aussie C’mon.

Following the positive reception of Drew’s nationwide “Real Australians Say Welcome” street art campaign, the pair are using those very tools to tackle another prominent social issue. Drawing inspiration once again from the power of a simple and bluntly affecting message, Holmes’ design deftly repurposes the classic cricket chant for a different message, complementing the green and gold with every other colour of the rainbow.

Holmes was moved to create the design following the US Supreme Court’s landmark decision to overturn state-level bans on same sex marriage, enshrining marriage equality across all 50 US states. “Particularly after the US decision, I was just trying to think of a response that related to us not having it in Australia, and that song popped into my head,” Holmes tells us.

“It’s something iconic that everyone knows but then it’s also a bit tongue-in-cheek because it’s a bit nationalistic which wigs me out a bit, and twisting that on its head. I just thought that’s a nice response, let’s just print that in rainbow. And maybe initially people who just know that phrase will see the poster and start thinking,” he says. “That’s my hope.”

As Holmes explains the cause is quite close to home. “My mum’s gay, my uncle’s gay, I’m not myself but it’s something that affects my family, so I wanted to make some kind of response to it,” he says.

We first noticed the posters a month and a half ago, and since then they’ve already spread throughout Adelaide. Now Holmes and Drew have launched a Pozible campaign to raise funds to print and send materials to communities right around the country. “I made the poster and was just sticking them up around town,” Holmes says. “And then Peter who works in the studio next door saw the poster and said ‘hey, do you want to team up and maybe turn it into a national project?’”

The poster as it first hit the streets of Adelaide

Having made a series of iconic additions to Adelaide’s walls over the years, from Albert Einstein-on-a-bike to those giant paste ups of old timey mugshots, the past six months have seen Drew’s socially motivated street art elevated to a whole other ballpark of national prominence via his “Real Australians Say Welcome” series. With the help of a crowdfunding campaign Drew took 1000 prints of the simple, striking statement to every Australian capital.

Over the following months the campaign attracted a groundswell of support that saw the project grow in size and ambition, with Drew even taking his message to Canberra and, audaciously, slapping the paste up right outside the Department of Immigration and Border Protection:

My 1000th poster found a fitting home #realaustralianssaywelcome @PeterDutton_MP pic.twitter.com/00gtyr8zE5

— PeterDrewArts (@PeterDrewArts) June 19, 2015

This time around however, Holmes and Drew are just chiming in to help the community get its point across. “Basically the Pozible campaign is a way to raise funds that will pay for materials and postage,” he says. “Then we’re printing them and giving them out for free to organisations or businesses that will display them publicly. Initially a lot of the organisations we contacted were organisations who work in the LGBTQI community, social groups, advocacy groups or support work,” he explains. “We contacted a bunch and said ‘hey, we’re going to print these posters, we want to give them out for free’, and we had a really good response.

“And I guess the reason for doing that and giving them to other people to do what they want, is that way they can use them in a way that’s best for their communities rather than us going over there,” he says. “They know their community and how it will best be used and it gives ownership to multiple people over the project, it’s not just me and Peter.”

With the issue once again in the news as a handful of Federal MPs continue to find new ways to delay reform supported by a majority of Australians and already embraced by Ireland, the US, Great Britain, England, New Zealand, Argentina, Belgium, Brazil, Canada, Denmark, Finland, France, Iceland, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Portugal, Slovenia, South Africa, Spain, Sweden and Uruguay, the campaign’s message remains all too relevant.

“I feel like we’re at a stage now where it’s kind of inevitable,” Holmes says. “So it’s kind of like come on, really?”

The Pozible campaign aims to raise $7000 by August 31, with any extra money to be donated to Australian Marriage Equality. To donate or find out more head here.