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I was fortunate to have the opportunity to work for the Youth ArtWorks programme for three years running. “The face” comes from my very first mural with the organisation. I have some photos of my work, but do not appear to have any satisfactory pictures of any of the three murals I worked on in their entirety–I will continue searching, as I know there were photos in the local newspaper at the time. In this case, however, no one has a photo of this entire mural, since it wrapped the side and underpass walls of a bridge. “The face” was one of two elements of this mural which I designed and pitched to the city council prior to painting the mural, and this piece was the lynchpin of the whole thing, since it tied the two faces of the mural together–literally and thematically. The concept was one of interior versus exterior, so that the daylit face would depict external features and tropes, whereas the underpass would depict more internal and unseen things. Being a highly collaborative project, the real coherence of all the elements with this general theme and with one another left aught to be desired, but in theory, this was the purpose of this half-skeletal face lying at the corner.
If you look at the direct view of the skull side above, you’ll notice that this piece was very quickly tagged. I was somewhat torn about this at the time, because like any young artist, I was gratified to find that someone had connected with my work; yet at the same time, even as a commemorative gesture, it’s hard to ignore the inherent selfishness involved in defacing artwork that was painstakingly made for the public benefit. Either way, the tag was eventually removed, and a few years later, so was the mural.
I haven’t featured the other element of this mural which I designed because I don’t have any good pictures of it and also because, unlike the face, I did not get to finish painting it on my own–I had help, which also means an admixture of different ideas and styles, making it a bit hard to claim as my own. This is a difficulty with these murals. In fact, one of the murals that I worked on is not even featured on this website at all–despite the fact that I do have photos of it–simply because it felt more cumbersome than it would be worth to try to delineate precisely what was my own work and what was not. In any case, 20 years on, none of these murals are still there, and the programme which gave me and other young artists the opportunity to get paid (albeit minimally) to make public artwork has also long since ceased to exist. Impermanence in art is something every creator has to come to terms with; however, discontinuing investment into the creative talents of the new generations has a wholly darker countenance in my view.