Peteskibreen's Blog

Opening Talk – Peter Breen, Co-Founder/Chair Jugglers Art Space Inc

Welcome and we pay our respects to the custodians of the land we are on, the land of the Yagera and Turrbal people, to elders past, present and emerging. Their art holds and expresses the spirit we are touched by.

Art in public spaces

The system is under strain

There are marks on the Ferny Grove train

Coming into the home town platform

Marks and colour and fame.

Around the skins there’s Montana

Ironlak- White Night are new

The lads are quietly hissing

The iPhones are dancing a few

This freedom won’t last forever

But Art finds the gaps in the wall

The powers that be 

Can’t understand us

We have a different call.

We look for the canvas on bin lids

We paint on the roofs and the trains

We won’t stop a moment 

For boring old pollies

For our hearts are flying, not tame. 

Peter Breen 2024 

This is a great event.

Congratulations Cheri for this work, this beautiful work.

Congratulations to all the artists Cheri has captured in still and video forms.

I met Martha Cooper a few years ago back at the Powerhouse with Lucks and Selina Miles. Selina’s film about her [ on Netflix] is magical.

I didn’t know that Brisbane has our own Martha Cooper! How many Cheris and Marthas are there in this world? A rare breed.

Cheri you’ve put in the time and and effort and money into your art, you are an accomplished and skilled photographer. You have experienced great grief and sadness recently with the death – from cancer- of your son. COVID threw a blanket over you as it did all of us. But here we are now – you’ve made it and we hope there are many more of these Cheri. Documenting this art with your level of skill and passion is incredibly important for anthropological reasons and for the sheer beauty and aesthetic pull of art – the artists’ and yours. Congratulations!

Cheri Desaily – opening Grand Artists at Vent Space, Brisbane February 3, 2024

1n 1998 – and some of you were just born then! – Jugglers started on a church property in Everton Hills. There were always graffiti artists/writers making marks at those events – including James Alley and Blends. We took it up a notch at 103 Brunswick Street in 2002. Many of you wrote and painted and experienced with marks on those walls.

Graffiti writers in the tunnel at Jugglers, 103 Bruswick Street, Fortitude Valley, Brisbane.

Paint shards after 18 years of aerosol on the walls at Jugglers Art Space Inc

I went to court with some of you, defended you with letters and presence, worked with Magistrate Christine Roney at Court #1 in the Diversion program before Campbell Newman and his protege Jarod Blei came to power. Randal Breen, Sam Eyles and Harley Breen painted the first QR murals on platform #1 at Central and on platform #9 at Roma Street – they are still there 20 years on from 2004.

It has been intriguing and awe inspiring to be around many of you and to be let into your worlds, to see the growth of your maturity, talent, skill and flourishing mural businesses. Someone has said to me tonight: ” This was our church when we walked up that tunnel and you were our pastor.”

Steve Falco, Jordan Bruce, [ Brightsiders]Zookeeper, Drapl, Jordi, Gimiks Born, Guido, Fintan, Lucks, Emily Devers, Treazy, Sofles, Sarah Sculley, Micro Galleries, Women on Walls, Gus, Libby Hayward, Warabah Wetherall….and so many more. Over the years we’ve touched each others lives and lost a few.

Joel Fergie [ Zookeeper] and Travis Vinson [ Drapl] a few years back after working on a silo at Thallon, Western Queensland.

A few years back I draw a few small works with paint and ink as my response, my commentary on graffiti mark makers, on what we were trying to do, what we were trying to be and understand as non-graffitists and as starting out as a mark making artist, standing and listening in solidarity with all who walked up that tunnel.

One of the drawings is taken from TarraWarra Museum of Art in the Yarra Valley. A stunning place owned by some of the big Melbourne money. I’ve been there a few times. In this drawing I’ve drawn over the walls some vague outlines of a young artist marking up, maybe a throw-up on one of the walls watched by a shadowy monk-like figure a spiritual director kind of guy. In repsenting the observer – maybe me – like this I was saying something like “I get what you are doing, I am distant and present, I won’t judge while I know there are consequences, but art must be marked up wherever and here if anywhere is a place to begin. Solidarity forever!”

“Tarrawarra mark makers” 2012 mixed media on paper mounted on foam core

“3 Wise Men” #3 2012 Mixed media on canvas

The second drawing is an extension of the first. It’s how I see and saw mark makers in the Jugglers tunnel, referenced as saints with halos, entitled “Three wise men” in my undertanding of being human and of a determined intention to move forward and make art, make marks. Even if I struggle to love, as I do, this is an attempt to. These drawings are raw statements about the depth of humans, their inherent wisdom, creativity and untapped abilities. These drawings are also saying: “Don’t touch my friends!” Let them flourish here. Let them find that flow from their imagination through their arm to the cap to the wall.

Before I hand over the Cheri to to open her exhibition I want to read a poem for all of us who call ourselves artists. By the late Irish poet and mystic, John O’Donohue, who like me, left the priesthood for art.

For the Artist at the start of the Day

“May morning be astir with the harvest of night;
Your mind quickening to the eros of a new question,
Your eyes seduced by some unintended glimpse
That cut right through the surface to a source.

May this be a morning of innocent beginning,
When the gift within you slips clear
Of the sticky web of the personal
With its hurt and its hauntings,
And fixed fortress corners,

A Morning when you become a pure vessel
For what wants to ascend from silence,

May your imagination know
The grace of perfect danger,

To reach beyond imitation,
And the wheel of repetition,

Deep into the call of all
The unfinished and unsolved

Until the veil of the unknown yields
And something original begins
To stir toward your senses
And grow stronger in your heart

In order to come to birth
In a clean line of form,
That claims from time
A rhythm not yet heard,
That calls space to
A different shape.

May it be its own force field
And dwell uniquely
Between the heart and the light

To surprise the hungry eye
By how deftly it fits
About its secret loss.”

~ John O’Donohue ~

Peter Breen and his long time friend, artist Travis Vinson [ Drapl] at the Grand Artists exhibition at Vent Space, South Brisbane.

Peter Breen with his long time friend artist Russell Fenn [ Sofles] and Peter’s grandson, Leonard.