Laura Wilkins speaks to Brighton-based street artist, Imbue, to discuss melting vinyl, WKD, and what it is he thinks is wrong with a plain, white wall.

NIGHT-TIME revellers on Brighton’s seafront and the bustling weekend hub of West Street would be unlikely to blink twice at the array of adverts and posters littering the walls and bus shelters. Least of all a poster for a well-known, and readily available alcohol brand. But one is different. At first glance you can see the recognisable WKD logo, bottle and blue branding, but on closer inspection, you realise that all is not as it seems.

The bottle is smashed on the tarmac, and its shattered glassy shards are glistening with blood. Turn back to the bars and you can see police shovelling drunk and lairy party-goers into riot vans. Point made.

Onlookers could be mistaken for thinking that this poster is some kind of hard-hitting government anti-drinking campaign. But what kind of advertiser would dare flaunt a well-known brand so crassly? None, because this is no campaign. This is street art, and the artist is Imbue.

“I really like the WKD thing,” says the artist from his Brighton flat. “It shows an interesting point about art because it’s not a pretty picture. I do some stuff that’s bright colours and would look great on someone’s wall. The WKD piece wouldn’t, but as a piece of art and the point it’s making it’s probably one of the best things I’ve done.”

The enthusiastic artist keeps his name, and personal life, as secret as he can. Well, when your work involves highlighting the flaws and hypocrisies posed by large corporations and belittling the rules and regulations posed by the authorities, then that may well be the best direction to take. Particularly when your favoured medium could be regarded by many to be a form vandalism.

“There are so many people that are obsessed with white walls,” he says disappointedly. “Or not even that – on the streets, a grey concrete wall. I don’t really see what’s so great about that. What’s wrong with, even if someone’s just thrown paint at it? At least it’s a splash of colour. And if you walk past that it makes you think. It’s like a story –  ‘what happened there, who threw that paint? Who actually bought paint and went out and did that?’”

And it’s this that is the nature of street art. If you’ve got a point to make, then why not find a public blank canvas to make it on? The many faces of street art have become increasingly popular in the UK, particularly over the last decade since the likes of Banksy have graced the walls and galleries of Britain with their work.  Graffiti now comes in many forms. Stencilled displays, posters, screen-prints and clever outdoor installations bring thought-provoking, subversive metaphors onto the streets to be seen by anyone and everyone.

“With street art a lot of people get to appreciate a range of stuff, on a more appealing level” says Imbue emphatically. “It’s all about finding different ways of getting an image out there in a quick way – discovering the best way to get it onto the street.”

Imbue has done quite the job of getting his name ‘out there’. Stickers emblazoned with his name adorn many walls and lampposts across the city, his videos are receiving thousands of hits on YouTube and the head honchos from WKD are sending him threatening letters. Not a bad result for an artist who has only been hitting the scene for a couple of years.

“It’s a good time for art because people realise that if they want to do art they can – they can just get out there and do stuff. They don’t have to go to college or whatever, you can just do what you want.”

Imbue’s artistic side began at an early stage. “I’ve always liked making stuff and painting and I’d always done art through school. It was the only thing I enjoyed doing.”

“If we had to study an artist we could say we’d study Banksy or D*Face just as an excuse to look at stuff we wanted to do really. So all our work was about graffiti and we basically just used all the school’s resources for making stencils and painting and stuff.

“I can remember printing stickers on the school’s laser printer. Putting sheets of vinyl in the laser printer and melting it and completely wrecking the printer.”

I found I couldn’t meet the man without asking about his interesting pseudonym and what it means to him. When planning to start a T-shirt company with a friend, Imbue compiled a list of words that he found interesting in an attempt to find a catchy name. ‘Imbue’ immediately caught his eye. “It has a few meanings – it means to dye something or change the colour, or to really inspire someone. If you really inspire them you’ve imbued them, which I thought was a pretty fitting name.”

In the short time that his work has been recognised, the young artist has produced a wide variety of works, and exhibitions. One of the first pieces to really raise his profile was Not So White, produced only two years ago. The grainy image, showing a saucy Snow-White, cheekily baring her underpants to onlookers, surreptitiously found its way onto the shelves in the Brighton Disney Store. The YouTube video of the act became a success and it wasn’t long before copies of the print were on sale in Art Republic. 

This has led to a string of exhibitions, including a solo stint at Ink-D gallery, and a recent slot in the Made in Brighton exhibition, quickly propelling the artist further into the public awareness.

As his work has gained in popularity, Imbue has become increasingly more mischievous with his statements. “I guess one of the biggest things I did was the drug vending machine,” he smirks. “That was a fun idea.” He refers to the day he took two old sweet vending machines and filled them with clear packets of suspicious looking powder, after brightly marking each machine ‘cocaine’ and ‘heroin’, he dropped both in the middle of Brighton’s number one tourist attraction. “I only thought on the day of taking it onto the pier, and I thought that it wouldn’t last five minutes, but people loved it,” he goes on, proudly. “I left it there for a while and filmed and took photos. After about half an hour I took it and moved on. It went on YouTube and in no time at all it got spread onto other blogs.”

This seems to be the power of street art. Its rising popularity with the public, the variety of mediums it appears through and the fact that it’s near impossible to copyright something that’s sprayed on the street, means that it can be passed on and shared more freely. 

But many believe that it is the popularity of street art that could be its downfall. How can a medium that is so openly anti-establishment continue to exist when it starts to become the establishment itself? I ask Imbue if he thinks street art is becoming too popular. “I don’t think there’s anything wrong with art becoming more popular,” he says. “It always changes. I mean it’s really great, you can go to an art gallery mid-week and there’s loads of cool people there, people that have come out rather than going to a club to see a band. They’re going out to see art and I think that’s a really good thing.”

The idea that art is becoming popular and accessible for the masses, including those who wouldn’t be interested in going to a typical art gallery, seems to be a recurring theme in any discussion on street art. Imbue himself is eager to advocate the non-pretentious nature of his work. “A lot of people go into a gallery or a museum and they have to be told why something is art. Many can get quite intimidated if they go in and there’s some stuff that they think, ‘I don’t get it’ or ‘I could do that’ or ‘what is this?’”

So street art is a return to art at its most basic, its most comprehensible. “In the old times there were cave paintings and stuff – writing on walls has been around forever, it’s just a human thing. If we didn’t have drawings on caves we wouldn’t know a lot of stuff. It’s a natural thing.”

I ask Imbue where he’s hoping to go from here, where is the next step for his work?  “My stuff’s becoming more political – not in a fake way because it’s the ‘in’ thing, I just try to do issues that concern me now.”

Hence the jarring images of smashed bottles lining the streets of Brighton. On a final note, I ask Imbue what reaction the posters got. He smiles. “I got a really long legal letter from WKD saying it all had to be removed and I had to send them any posters to be destroyed. I really worried about that for a while, and then I decided to just ignore it – I didn’t hear anything more about it.”

After a thoughtful pause he continues. “In a way I’m flattered I got that letter. I made a picture with a point to prove that has actually reached the head of WKD. I think that’s quite impressive. I’m really proud of it.”