Paul Meikle (b. 1993, Edinburgh) is a mixed media artist based in Edinburgh. His work focuses on often-overlooked urban landscape objects and their decay, both intentional and unintentional, exploring the processes that shape their appearance. He sees their imperfections as part of a story, each scrape or layer of flaking paint feeling like skimming through a page in a book, revealing fragments of what came before.
Translating the degradation of these objects, he employs experimental methods, using corrosives, abrasives and complex layering to achieve their textures. He aims to recreate the techniques that caused them to exist, rather than meticulously copy their subject matter.
The city space not only inspires his work but also provides the materials he works with, scrap metal and wooden boards become canvases, while torn-down posters become integral components of his compositions.
For Hidden Door’s 2025 Festival Meikle presents Helter Skelter, a large-scale sculpture standing at 3 meters tall and 5 meters wide. The sculpture will force viewers to look up, emulating the imposing scale that the Montgomery Street Park Helter Skelter once had on generations of visitors.
For over 50 years, the Helter Skelter was an integral part of the community, with Leithers far and wide able to recall playing with, drawing on, or, as Paul Meikle has recently discovered, peeing down, the structure. Regardless of how it was interacted with, fond and priceless memories were made, and it is those memories that Meikle could not see destroyed with the slide when Edinburgh council decided that was its fate.
When the structure was deemed unsafe for use, it was set to be scrapped alongside the decades worth of memories it holds. Meikle, an artist whose work focuses on decaying environments, saw an opportunity and contacted those involved with a plan to ensure that this once local staple and its stories live on forever.
Meikle dismantled the slide and subsequently transformed it into a series of sculptural artworks. Its rusted surfaces, peeling paint and faded colours are integral to the collage-like artworks; he treats these imperfections as visual records, each one a trace of time encoded with memory.
Accompanying the large work, a selection of smaller sculptures will also be on display. These invite a closer engagement with the textures and marks left over time, that hold the emotional and material history of the Helter Skelter.
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