Bloomfield

CLIENT - Bloomfield Shopping Centre
Our friends at Arts and Business NI introduced us to the team at Bloomfield Shopping Centre in 2023. As arts practitioners, we are all too familiar with the traditional relationship between arts organisations and shopping centres - we’ll give you a space to showcase your art, and in return, we stop paying rates on a vacant unit. We believed that a more fruitful relationship between arts and business was possible and so began to think about how artists could work with the centre to improve their offer.

We commissioned three large-scale murals on the outside of the building and used this investment to leverage additional funding from Arts and Business who funded a multi-disciplinary engagement which was focused on the indoor area.

After spending time in the space, talking to customers and staff we engaged a writer to create a series of characters who inhabit a fantasy world lurking below the surface in the shopping centre. These characters were subsequently brought to life by an illustrator and their avatars turned into stickers, paste-ups and murals which were installed all over the inside of the centre. The house tannoy was also used to tell parts of the story and further bring it to life.