LOOKING UP.

When was the last time you looked up and admired a crane? If you live in a big city, you’ve probably passed a dozen of them already this week, without a second glance. They’re dotted all over the skyline, these hulking steel towers painted in white, or bright shades of red and blue. And while they regularly go up and come down, moving from job to job - they also feel like they’ve somehow always been there. So they fade into the background, like power lines, or the contrails from passing planes.

Maybe I’m wired differently though. I find cranes irresistible. I’m always stopping to look up at them - to admire the way they stretch across the sky, poised above the chaos of a building site. My camera roll has more photos of cranes than I’d like to admit - cranes in London, Tokyo, New York, Pittsburgh, Sheffield, Phnom Penh. 

Cranes pull cities together. They tell stories of change; of one thing becoming another. And they move with an elegance and grace that belies their size and weight.

No surprise then that cranes have also been turning up in my work from the beginning. I think of them as characters, talking to each other, adding movement, colour and personality to a cityscape. 

In 2012, I set up on a wall at Village Underground in Shoreditch. A prestigious spot for artists where a new mural appeared each month. A big wall, difficult to access because of the narrow pavements and constant traffic below. Not long before, I’d had a terrible experience, losing a months worth of work in a robbery. This felt like exactly the challenge I needed to repair from that.

I had to hire a scissor lift to reach the highest areas and because I was making a stop frame animation of the mural coming together, I set up my camera on the pavement below with help from a patient selection of assistants who would press the button after each frame painted onto the wall.

It was an exciting time in London. I had a little studio down a cobbled street in Hoxton and I could see Shoreditch transforming around me, buildings going up and every gap being filled with new things. But it was also clear what would happen next in this story… rents going up and the community torn apart- people forced to move further out of the city.

It was on my daily journeys from Bethnal Green to my studio that the concept for the animation began to form - trees fighting for space on the pavement, their roots splitting the tarmac, whilst small stubborn shoots sneak through the cracks in the walls.

It made me think about the bigger picture. About this relentless race for progress, the constant pouring of concrete, the fight to contain and control nature. And yet, despite it all, life still finds a way. And I couldn’t help but wonder: what if we were no longer here? What if all the building, all the growth, just stopped and nature was allowed to take over again?

https://www.jopeel.com/film-and-animation/things-change

The cranes are one of the first things to appear in the animation. Just as they are one of the first signs of change in a city. They rise before the buildings do,and with a quiet sense of authority they get to work. 

They symbolise development for me - and not just in a commercial sense. Change. Motion. The sense that something is happening, even if you can’t quite see what it is yet. 

But this thing happened while I was making the mural that still tortures me, thirteen years later. One day, in the middle of painting, I was offered a chance to go up in a crane.

When painting a huge public-facing mural, one of the most enjoyable - and sometimes surprising - aspects is the interaction with people passing by. This wall was no exception. Over the course of the month, I had so many conversations that I could probably write a whole book just about the people I met (some of whom I’m still friends with now). 

And on this day it was a crane driver who came to chat to me about what I was painting and why. It struck a chord with me: someone who spends their days high above the city, taking an interest in what was happening at street level. 

And I think he felt the same, that someone down here could take such an avid interest in the cranes above our heads, so he invited me to climb up the crane and to see the city from the cab.

I said no. I was running out of money, was hellbent on making the animation, didn’t feel I could spare the time. I think I also had a sense that opportunities like this probably come up all the time; that my future would be full of offers to climb up into the cab of a tower crane and look down on the city below.

But I haven’t been offered the chance to go up in a crane again. It’s still on the bucket list. 

And so I often find myself looking up at them and imagining what it’s like up there. Above the dust and the drills and the noise; where people and cars are shrunk to toy size, the sun coming up on the towerblocks, the quiet inside the driver’s cab. Sitting at the top of a huge object that is also, somehow, weightless.