Ant Steel is not your typical graffiti artist. He’s not one to scale walls or stealthily paint street corners under cover of darkness. Steel asks permission to paint. Always. He is not interested in flashy tags or tokens and tends to paint vibrant and very realistic works as community projects.
Steel’s more formal approach to graffiti stems from a career in graphic design that involved preparing images for advertising. If it was a spray job, Steel would go see the painters dangling from the side of giant billboards with their feet firmly on the ground. It’s only more recently that Steel has begun creating a different kind of public art: a mural of Queen Elizabeth II outside a shopping mall, a massive pro-Ukrainian painting on a wall in the city - and now, a series of works as artist-in-residence at St Albans Cathedral, Britain’s oldest site of continuous Christian worship.
The wall depicting a Steel Peregrine Falcon painted for the St Albans Film Festival. Photo: courtesy Ant Steel.
“Street art has a loud voice and I want it to scream as loud as possible,” Steel told Artnet News. “At the cathedral, my job is to lead workshops and events. My goal is to get involved in the community.
To be clear, Steel won’t transform the stone walls of St Albans with colour, although in a curious echo the cathedral is riddled with thousands of carved graffiti marks dating back hundreds of years. Instead, Steel will create large-scale works on panels and work with children, asylum seekers, refugees and adults to create an exhibition in November, one that he says will “rotate some heads”.
Steel Wall for Ukraine in St Albans. Photo: courtesy Ant Steel.
Cathedral approached Steel after hearing about the workshops he ran for the St Albans Film Festival as part of its wider efforts to attract younger and more diverse audiences. The landmark runs its artist-in-residence program since 2018.
“The cathedral has long been a patron of the arts and is keen to support local artists,” Kevin Walton, the cathedral’s canon chancellor, told Artnet News. “Ant Steel’s fresh and engaging artistic offering and dedicated approach to community work matched our vision.”
Walton was also drawn to the idea of a contemporary graffiti artist playing on the marks worked in the cathedral. “We are consciously building on our long heritage in this place,” Walton said.
As the most remarkable landmark in the city of St Albans, the cathedral strives to refine itself in the modern age, not just a religious site, but a site of community cultural engagement, which Steel calls “a glimmer of ‘Hope on the horizon in Hertfordshire’.
See more images from the artist in the resident program below:
Ant Steel at work outside St Albans Cathedral. Photo: courtesy Ant Steel.
One of Ant Steel’s workshops taking place outside St Albans Cathedral. Photo: Steel Ant.
St Albans Cathedral has invited Ant Steel as Artist in Residence. Photo: courtesy Ant Steel.
Ant Steel’s first work as artist in residence, a cherub. Photo: courtesy Ant Steel.
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