“I find the whole process very elegant. The part most people find tedious, the actual cutting of the stencil, I find very meditative. Finding a wall and location that fits your idea is just as important. The painting process is the culmination of your planning and is also meditative. You don’t aim for perfection, spray paint has its own magic. Embracing this and the mistakes is part of the whole stencil aesthetic.”

Gisborne artist Razor Taser Laser is creating two separate but connected series of work for The Little Street Art Festival in 2024. His first series of works, The Writing is on the Screen, is a set of four site-specific stencil paintings that playfully ruminate on the transformation of language in the digital age. With words increasingly replaced by iconography that can emphasise response and proclamations, our communication is altered. Razor Taser Laser’s emoji phrases are contemporary and yet dated, bridging between generations to illuminate the universal need for communication.

In Golden Apple, Glistening Melon, Razor Taser Laser applies a similar exploration to visual forms, and the distinction between digital and analogue image creation. His painting, painstakingly stencilled using 3.3mm squares, takes a still life painting that has been pixelated as part of the universally popular game Minecraft, and returns it to the real world, albeit retaining the pixel based form. It is a real world-cum-digital-cum digital-real world.