Support a great cause. Send Hazard to Ajo

An introduction to Hazard aka Harriet Wood

Harriet is a good friend and an incredible artist who I’ve known since my days running hip hop nights and playing DJ sets around York a decade ago.
It is Harriet who created the beautiful illustrations on all of our sauces, her artwork has become an absolutely integral part of our brand image and how we are perceived as a company.

Although Harriet is perhaps better known as her alias, Hazard.
Hazard is graffiti artist and illustrator currently living in Barcelona, Spain. She has been voted in The Guardian’s Top 5 Female Graffiti Artists in the UK followed by The Huffington Post’s Top 25 Female Street Artists worldwide. She started spray painting 11 years ago when she was 14 years old and has turned her love for urban art into her career.
Over the past few years she has spray painted a 7m x 21m main stage on her own in 3 days for Glastonbury Festival; hosted workshops and presentations for the BBC; and has also painted a whole street as a community re-design project for Sustrans.

A bit about Ajo and the Ajo project

Ajo is a small town, located in the Sonoran desert in southwestern Arizona. Up until 1985, nearly everyone in the town had a job, along with the previous three generations in a huge copper mine less than a mile from the town. For an idea of its size and scale the open pit crater is as deep as the Empire State Building is tall. Enormous.
When the mine closed in 1985 the loss of employment and the subsequent local economic collapse was catastrophic. The popoulation plummeted and it has never fully recovered.
Recent years have started to show hope for the area. Charities and institutions like ArtPlaceAmerica and the International Sonoran Desert Alliance have been working hard to promote arts in the town as a catalyst to spark economic regeneration across the area.
More recently Ajo Street Art Project alongside Tucson Arts Brigade have been aiming to raise enough funding to create large scale murals across the historic border town walls and host a several day event in the centre of Ajo.
In Harriet’s own words “I’ve also decided if I make my target – anything over the goal will go to Tucson Arts Brigade.“

This is a project that we support wholeheartedly at Khoo’s Hot Sauce. We believe that art is a powerful medium that can and should bring communities together.
I can personally attest to the positive impact a youth street art project and other creative community opportunities had on me during a very difficult period in my adolescence. If Harriet’s work can inspire anyone else the way I was inspired in my home town years ago it is worth every penny.

You can find Harriet’s Kickstarter campaign at the link below.
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1269065311/arizona-mexico-border-town-mural-project

Also some more information on the project.
https://www.psychologies.co.uk/help-support-community-arts-project
http://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2015/03/ajo-arizona-part-1-a-small-town-pushed-to-the-brink/388976/
http://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2015/04/ajo-oasis-in-the-desert/389051/