For Waterloo Festival 2020 – this year presented online – we worked alongside Hart Club to design our website and commission original artwork by David Bassadone which features throughout.
Exterior of St John's Waterloo by David Bassadone
Hart Club is a non-profit organisation based in SE1, just opposite Lambeth North Station, dedicated to championing neurodiversity in the Arts. Their project space regularly hosts community focused workshops and events and consists of a gallery, ceramics and print studios and inclusive design studio. You might have spotted the giant heart on the outside of their building!
Hart Club works alongside organisations and charities that facilitate artists with learning disabilities, head injury, dementia, autism and other neurological variations in order to provide a platform for their creative output that so often goes unseen.
Portrait of David Bassadone at Hart Club, by Adam Donnelly
David Bassadone is one of the artists Hart Club represents and we were thrilled to commission him to capture and bring to life elements of this year’s festival.
Garden at St John's Waterloo by David Bassadone
featuring La La Land by Peter Avery as it appeared in Nothing Endures But Change, an outdoors sculpture exhibition curated by Susan Haire, Waterloo Festival 2018
David has an incredible eye for detail and a photographic memory that allows him to recreate chosen images with remarkable density and accuracy. Having been drawing avidly almost everyday for over 60 years, David’s debut exhibition hosted last year at Hart Club was received to great acclaim.
Slideshow of David's debut exhibition at Hart Club
His main resource and inspiration for his drawings are BBC pamphlets from the 1950s that he studied at school, alongside The National Geographic, which he collects and archives at home. Due to his exceptional memory, David can recall the exact images and corresponding page numbers from books he hasn’t seen since he was a child. His support worker then requests the archive images from UCL and the National Library of Wales, which David transforms into astonishingly intricate pencil and pen drawings predominantly of cityscapes and industrial landscapes.
The video below gives you an insight into David’s extraordinary draughtsmanship and prolific body of work.
For this year's Waterloo Festival we commissioned David to recreate iconic photographs that capture St John’s and the atmosphere of previous festivals. Hart Club also created a custom font - which you can see used throughout the site - which emulates David’s handwriting.
Interior of St. John's Waterloo by David Bassadone
For more information & artwork commissions please contact: hartclublondon@gmail.com | www.hartclub.org | @hartclublondon
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