With the cover of Madeleine Pelling’s book projected onto the Millennium Gallery, the writing was very truly on the wall from the very beginning. Speaking about her latest book for the Off The Shelf literary festival, Pelling’s talk was a personal and interesting insight into the world of graffiti in the eighteenth century, and some of the untold stories we have been able to explore as a result.
“There are hundreds of words to describe the marks that were left” begins Pelling, discussing the myriad of language used in the past few centuries to describe messaging via graffiti-like methods, from the Ancient Egyptians to our own modern day. Going into detail about the types of messages conveyed, Pelling detailed their range of uses from political to record-making, to simple mischievous nature: “graffitied penises on the wall – nothing changes”.
But a large focus of the Off The Shelf event was on the importance of graffiti in telling untold stories, stories that would be lost to time without the occurrence of graffiti. Detailing one in particular, she noted how potter James Doe, a master of the pottery craft at the time, was discovered through his simple graffitiing of his suicide note throughout his house, allowing members of the public to collectively build up a profile of the lost soul. “The power that it gives us to come into contact with people” is a testament to its true and underappreciated power.
It was also interesting to hear about Pelling’s thoughts regarding its similarity with social media today. “Graffiti can inform and misinform”, she told us whilst detailing riots spurred on by the use of graffiti, which involved graffiti being used to both incite civil unrest, and protect religious minorities from the violence. Given the similar effects that social media has shown, particularly in regard to the riots this summer, the parallels are stark to see, but is testament to the timelessness of this art form.
But Pelling was also clear about the extent of our knowledge on graffiti and the stories it can tell, particularly when done through a temporary medium. “For everything that I’ve found, there’ll be 20 things […] I didn’t find […] voices of all these people”, in what can only be described as a slightly sobering reality, that so many stories in the history of humanity are lost to the past. But knowing that scholar such as Pelling has taken the time to investigate such hidden pasts in depths in such a text is heartwarming, and her talk was a fantastic insight into what we don’t know about the people we don’t know.
Rating: ★★★★☆
Writing on the Wall was published in March 2024. Other Off the Shelf Festival events can be found here
