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Politicians have been encouraged by a local arts centre to donate their canvassing posters and give them a second life.
An online post by Sticky Finger Arts has asked each of the political parties to “consider giving the old posters so we can transform them into lots of magical creations”.
Mark Revels the manager of Sticky Fingers and says he’s been taken aback by the response.
“We done something similar a few years back, with a local councillor called Gavin Malone,” explains Mark.
“We mentioned it in passing to him and he dropped some posters in. We then worked with a local school to make trains and planes with it. Our ethos is to use a lot of recycled stuff.”
Now that the Stormont Assembly Election has been decided, Mark has put the call out to all the political parties on social media.
He says “the idea is to get school groups and other organisations to turn the posters into different pieces of art”.
He explains that Sticky Fingers “don’t work to templates”, instead using “raw materials and recyclable goods”.
He adds that the Newry arts centre plans on “re-gifting the art works to the Electoral Office, where the posters came from”.
He calls it a “natural cycle, of the posters being made up to do the justice of whatever candidate was up for election and then we will bring it back to the offices as a piece of art”.
In this way, he says the community who voted them in, or are the electorate they work with, benefit.
Mark added that they might make some public art as well and display it in different parts of Newry “to show people how the posters are re-used and to let people know that the posters can have another purpose”.
And while many of the children who attend Sticky Fingers are too young to be politically inclined, Mark says they work with varying ages, “so some community groups we work with might want to put a message on it”.
While that’s not the plan, Mark says he’s “not ruling out some messages going back to the Electoral Office”.
Over 50,000 people have interacted with the post, and Mark says it’s exciting to see what might come of it.
Some politicians have already dropped off their posters, and Mark adds that “a lot of people have put pressure on for the posters to be taken down and donated”.
However, with the DUP remaining coy about it to re-commit to power sharing, Mark says the possibility of further elections in the coming months might make politicians hold on to their posters.
While many of the canvassing posters have been removed following the election, Mark says it’s time for move away from these types of posters for good.
“We have a strong ethos on recycling,” says Mark, “and we have banned things like googly eyes and glitter because we know that that stuff is lethal for the environment”.
He reveals that the arts centre “came up against some resistance” over this, with some people asking how an art centre could not have glitter.
But he says the message has “gone out there to people who come to us”.
Sticky Fingers take in a lot of its materials from ‘The Play Resource’ in Belfast.
Mark says the children “make a lot of things using masking tape and sticking pits and pieces and cutting them”.
However, he adds that “they don’t take this away with them, we strip all this back again and it’s then ready for the next day, allowing things like the bottle tops or yoghurt pots and bits of cardboard to be recycled over and over again for more than a year”.
While Mark acknowledges that Sticky Fingers “can’t stop the production of plastic, we don’t want to encourage this throw-away culture where plastic goods are thrown away at the end of the day”.
“If the goods are there and are still being produced,” says Mark, “we will take them in rather than them going to a dump. This will start a cycle in here where they are constantly being used to create imaginative arts projects.”
