Jim Bachor makes street art – quite literally.
For the last few years the 52-year-old has been making art out of the blight on our roads.
Inspired to make mosiacs after a trip to Italy in the late 90s, Bachor has become “the pothole guy”, decorating holes in streets with colourful designs ranging from chickens to Aretha Franklin’s face.
He made his first pothole mosaic in 2013, just outside his home in Chicago. “The potholes in our street were particularly bad,” he says. “I put two and two together. I had this unsolvable problem outside of our house, and 100 yards away in my studio I have this passion for an art form that is so durable.”
Wearing a high-vis jacket and armed with traffic cones, Bachor has so far created 79 installations around the world including in New York and Helsinki. He creates the mosaics in his studio, fixing the artwork on a cheesecloth. Bachor then prepares the concrete on site and carefully sets the mosaic in the road. It takes about two hours, and he’s back the next day when the concrete is set to scrub off the excess.
His requirements are specific – he even sent a pothole scout out in New York to find the right ones. The pothole can’t be in the centre of the street, it needs to be a road in a relatively good condition, and it must be a rough size of 18 to 24 inches, and a couple of inches deep.
He doesn’t know the legalities of filling in potholes without permission, and his New York installations were removed by the city’s transport department.
His work seems to cause less trouble in his hometown.
“There was one time on south side of Chicago. This cop gets out and walks up to me and says, ‘Are you that pothole guy?’
“‘Yeah,’ I said.
“He goes, ‘That is so fucking cool.’”
Find more of Jim Bachor’s art on his website.
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