Ben Wilson, a 60-year-old artist from London, has a unique canvas for his art – dried chewing gum trodden into the ground. Found lying on his side on London’s iconic Millennium Bridge, Wilson, dressed in a paint-daubed orange jumpsuit, takes what most people actively avoid or simply don’t notice and turns it into something beautiful and delightful for passersby who take a closer look underfoot.
“The important thing is the gum is below the metal tread,” Wilson noted. “The beauty of it is they’re all different shapes and sizes so there’s no conformity.”
Wilson’s artwork on chewing gum is not just about creating beauty from waste, but it is also about changing people’s perception and making them discover a hidden world beneath their feet. “By painting a picture which is so small, those that see it then discover a hidden world beneath their feet,” Wilson explained. “If they look then they see, so it’s about perception.”
Back in his north London studio, Wilson works on small mosaic tiles, which he later sticks on the walls of London’s Underground train platforms, hidden in plain sight. These images are more personal to Wilson than the chewing gum works, and he considers them as an “intuitive visual diary.”
“The pictures are a celebration of my life and those that I care dearly about … they are (also) a process of visual inquiry – trying to make sense of the world,” he said.
Raised by artist parents, Wilson has been involved in art from a very young age, working with clay from the age of three and having his first artist show at around 10 or 11 years old. Over the years, his artwork evolved from sculpture and large pieces in the natural environment to focusing on rubbish and discarded items from a consumerist world, like chewing gum, which he has been painting for 19 years.
Wilson found a loophole in the legalities surrounding public art and defacement of public property. The top surface of the dried gum is not subject to local or national jurisdictions, which allows Wilson to paint without defacing public property.
“I found this little space where I could create a form of art where I could be spontaneous and do something which evolves out of the place in which it’s created,” Wilson said.
Though much of his public street art has been removed by authorities, including gum from the pavement or tiles from the Underground, the hundreds of gum paintings on Millennium Bridge have been left untouched.
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