Next time you go to London, be sure to keep your eyes out for unique pieces of art scattered around town. Don’t assume it’ll be an easy task, for this art is not something you can see with the naked eye, unless you are blessed with microscopic eyes.
Suitably dubbed "Little People," this project consists of "little hand-painted people left in London to fend for themselves." Literally. It’s like Gilligan’s Island, but London Style.
A very "Where's Wally?"-esque innovational art idea that is too cute to be disregarded yet too small to be seen, the “Little People” are the brain children of Slinkachu. A UK Street Artist who likes to include the element of surprise to his street-based works, Slinkachu through this project aims to encourage London city-dwellers to be more aware of their surrounding; a certain “stop and smell the roses” attempt sans flowers but with tiny installations of little people going on about with their lives in the hustle and bustle of the big city.
Starting as a pet project in 2006 that involved remodeling and painting miniature model train set characters and leaving them on the street, the “Little People” project is both a street art installation project and a photography project. First documented on a blog, the “Little People” project got so much positive feedback online that Slinkachu recently published a book sold on Amazon that has pictures of many of the popular tiny installations. According to Slinkachu, “The scenes I set up, more evident through the photography, and the titles I give these scenes aim to reflect the loneliness and melancholy of living in a big city, almost being lost and overwhelmed. But underneath this, there is always some humor. I want people to be able to empathize with the tiny people in my works.”
So far he’s done installations in London, Manchester, Norway, Amsterdam and Barcelona; but they are yet to be found for according to him, the chances of finding them without knowing where they are installed in the first place is like finding a needle in the haystack. A chance of that happening is less than getting hit by lightening believe it or not.
For more information on this tiny project, consult the “Little People- A Tiny Street Project” website and Slinkachu’s official website.
Images: Slinkachu.com
-KStaff
