If you have been around the Nuart Festival and its extended family over the years, you have spent time with Dotmasters. And one of the reasons that Nuart is such an influential street art festival is that family element, intimate in the stories that it tells and the players that come and go over the years and add to the lexicon of what the whole movement means. Dotmasters is a long-time member of the Nuart family, and recently he was included as an artist for Nuart Aberdeen, and was documented there by MZM Projects. 

In the short, Why is That Shovel There?, Dotmasters talks about his history in the UK stencil art scene, the accessibility of the art form (a pillar concept of the Nuart Festival) and new media hacking.

Quick aside about the shovel: Dotmasters references the Shovel and the Diggers. The original 17th century Diggers were a revolutionary social justice group in the UK fighting the enclosures act by farming land that was previously the
"commons." Or as Nuart's Martyn Reed notes, after capitalism discovered the value of sheep of course. The San Francisco Diggers of the 1960s took their name from the original British movement.

cover photo by Louise Kendal