No longer seen as the hobby of destructive youths, stencil art is finally being respected as a legitimate art form in its own right. Fiona Ivits trawled Sydney’s laneways and has this story.

Not all of Sydney’s art hangs on walls. Hidden down laneways, on footpaths, on front fences and garage doors, stencil artists ply their trade. Created using stencil cut-outs and spray cans, stencils are quirky visual comments on the urban landscape, inspired by politics, pop-culture or simply the urge to create, to make a mark on a public space.

Recently, stencilling has begun to filter in from the alleys to the galleries. In October Sydney played host to the Stencil Festival, held at the Pine Street Creative Arts Centre in Chippendale. The Stencil Festival, which has run for several years in Melbourne, showcases some of Australia’s finest stencil art. The work on display is intricate, and painstakingly created. The larger pieces here can take up to 50 hours to create, a far cry from the furtive pieces hastily stencilled onto someone’s back fence late at night that dot the back streets of Sydney’s inner west.

On a sunny Saturday afternoon the Stencil Festival is a hive of activity. A group of stencil artists are set up outside, doing a ‘live spraying.’ People lean over their shoulders to watch, some having brought t-shirts, skateboards and other items to be stencilled by the pros. This is the second year the Festival has toured Sydney, and Stencil Festival organiser and Melbourne native JD Mittman is pleased with the response, given Sydney’s much smaller street art scene. “We’ve had a good response, from those who have come,” he says.

With events such as the Stencil Festival, and the support of galleries such as Mays Lane and China Heights, street art in Sydney is beginning to regain some lost ground. Artists such as Minigraff and Kill Pixie have held successful shows, and increasingly street artists are finding inventive ways to circumvent legal restrictions, such as ‘sticker art’, pre-created artworks which are pasted into public spaces.

JD Mittman believes that the rise in stencil and sticker art over more traditional graffiti forms will eventually lead to a greater acceptance of street art. “Stencil art is generally more acceptable for people, its more beautiful and figurative, and can be political and quite humorous too… I think that people can really understand when they look at a piece, whereas more traditional graffiti, such as thow-ups and tags, well they have different connotations.”

Mittman notes that there are some fundamental differences between Melbourne and Sydney in their approach to street art. “I guess the major difference that we have been around in Melbourne since 2004, so yes people are taking us a bit more serious, and we have received council grants to hold our festival” he says, “but I think the major difference is that the art-form is much more present in Melbourne, its you know, a bit more centralised in some ways. You can find it quite easily in the lanes, the CBD and inner city. Here it is seems a bit more dispersed, a bit less obvious. I mean, there is some street art around here but you have to look for it a bit more.

If Melbourne is, as street art theorist Christine Dew terms it, ‘Australia’s undisputed graffiti capital,’ Sydney is an outlying suburb, with a once-thriving scene pushed underground by restrictive laws.

Mittman blames the increasing gentrification of Sydney’s inner-city for the downturn in street art culture. “From what I know, Sydney’s scene has suffered a lot since the Olympic Games” he says, “and it is not really recovering since then.”

Christine Dew’s seminal compilation of Australian graffiti lore, Uncommissioned Art, also marks the Olympics as a turning point for the street art scene, with Sydney artist Spice lamenting the ‘brown-wash’ of Sydney’s graffiti. “Our history of the train lines was there for so long, and when the Olympics came they went over everything and we lost our whole history of graff.”

Dew reports that the expansion of the City of Sydney borders to include Redfern and the area around King St spelled trouble for street art, with even legal walls created by international artists being cleaned up.

City of Sydney spokesperson Leanne Lincoln claims that “the Council respects street art as artistic and social expression.” That respect does not apparently extend to ‘illegal” graffiti, which is considered to be a criminal act under State law. Even legally commissioned aerosol art walls are subject to a dizzying array of conditions before they can win Council approval.

JD Mittman has experienced some of these restrictions first-hand while putting together the Sydney leg of the Stencil Festival. “You know, we’re running a Street Art Tour of Sydney as part of the festival… it was originally going to be called the Graffiti Tour, but Council got wind of it and were going to stop us from running it because they said it celebrated illegal graffiti. So we just changed the name to the Street Art Tour, and then they were fine with it.”

Street artist Chris Tamm is keen to change the perception of criminality associated with ‘uncommissioned’ street art in Sydney. Tamm, curator of outdoor graffiti gallery Mays Lane in St Peters, lead the re-named Street Art Tour around the inner west, showcasing the best of graffiti art in the area and talking the hundred-strong crowd through street art history, legend and folklore.

Tamm believes that street art is an important part of a city’s visual landscape. As with many stencil artists, Tamm started his career in street art as a response to the encroach of advertising into public space. “I don’t like ads or signs, and I get no say about them in my visual space. Sometimes publishing straight to a wall is the easiest response – advertising denies your right of reply.”

“I like to think that good street artists are altruistic and not just vandals,” he says. I like to show that people should just do art and put out their own messages. It’s unfortunate that some people might not like it. There are more serious issues than unsolicited art on public space – like white collar crime.”