Photography: Nikki McWilliams
Across Glasgow city centre, large-scale murals turn blank walls into a running conversation between the old city and the one living here now.
Glasgow's murals are a relatively recent layer of the city, but they have become a fantastic way to explore it. Huge tenement gable ends have effectively become a street canvas, with artists such as Smug creating works on a scale that is hard to miss. What I like is the way the murals open routes into people, institutions and stories from Glasgow's past while you are walking through the city that exists today.
Glasgow's City Centre Mural Trail grew from individual street-art commissions into one of the most visible expressions of the contemporary city. Smug's work is particularly useful for understanding what the murals can do. His modern St Mungo and St Enoch reinterpret Glasgow's founding stories without dressing them as conventional historical scenes. The murals show a city comfortable enough with its history to remake it in public, while giving visitors a reason to look at streets that might otherwise feel like spaces between major attractions.
In the St Mungo mural, the robin quietly reconnects a contemporary portrait with one of the miracles represented in Glasgow's coat of arms. At large scale, faces and figures can look photographic from across the street before resolving into painted marks at close range. Pipes, windows and irregular walls become part of the composition. The trail is not a fixed museum collection. New work, disappearance and change are part of contemporary Glasgow too.
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