Going large in Brooklyn: Camille Walala at WantedDesign

In the last couple of years, Camille Walala has been getting bigger and bigger – both in terms of her growing global fame, and the sheer size of the artist’s work. There was last year’s London Design Festival project, the squidgily glorious Villa Walala; the madcap labyrinth of colour she built in Greenwich Peninsula’s NOW Gallery, and a series of building-spanning murals in London, Ohio, Mauritius, and more.

Nothing, however, has had anything like the in-your-face magnitude of what she has planned for New York next month.

In Brooklyn’s Industry City, Sunset Park, stands a 40m, seven-storey building housing a multidisciplinary mix of design studios. It’s attractive enough, perhaps a little weathered in the manner of many of Brooklyn’s historic urban buildings, but it’s not the sort of place that would get a second glance unless you happened to be unusually interested in NYC architecture. That’s about to change.

On 17 May, Walala will unveil what is already being billed as a highlight of this year’s event. Her largest mural and biggest NYC commission to date is a 40m, 3D effect fascia that riffs on the architecture of the structure, the existing repetitive pattern formed by the windows and – for colour inspiration – the play of sunset light that bathes the building at dusk. In terms of its striking geometrics and bright, bold colours, the design is classic Walala, but the 3D dimension adds a head-turning pop-out depth to the work that is likely to see the building become an icon of the Brooklyn cityscape – both for the duration of WantedDesign and for many years to come.

The transformation is set to take the Walala team around 12 days and is not without risk – as Camille says, ‘Working at great heights always creates difficulties. Translating drawings from an A4 sheet to 40 metres is quite tricky. You have to try and imagine what a small detail of 10cm would look like at 10 metres…’

Biggest mural ever, festival headliner – most artists would call it a day there, but Walala is also busy on the on the other side of the Hudson, working on an installation at WantedDesign hub Terminal Stores in collaboration with the ingenious magnetic-wall-covering people Visual Magnetics. Here, she's creating an interactive room that will allow visitors to move Walala-designed shapes around the walls and create their own Walala work. ‘I think it’s interesting to put my designs in the hands of other people, to see how someone else may apply my work to a space,’ she says.

If you’re in town for Wanted Design (17–21 May 2018), you can hear Camille discussing both works, her artistic approach, and her passionate devotion to pattern at 12.30pm on Monday 21 May, when she’ll deliver a keynote on the theme of ‘Happier and healthier living and working space’.

The Sunset Park mural is revealed on 17 May and will be in place permanently.
The Visual Magnetics installation will be on show at Terminal Stores, 269 11th Avenue, New York from 19–22 May.

See wanteddesignnyc.com for more…