Our recent Mural project this is who we are caught the eye of the festivals officer from my local council and we were invited to scale the project up for a local community festival. The invitation was to facilitate a mural for an estimated 200-250 people during the Malahang Community Festival in November. We prepared by painting hundreds of blank faces onto 4.5 metres of double primed canvas, choosing canvas over ply board this time because it could be rolled up, which made it easier to store and transport. 

The projects aim was to encourage people to connect with art in a public and community focused way. People were invited to spend some time painting a version of themselves onto prepared blank faces on a large canvas banner alongside 200 others, to consider their individuality and celebrate there diversity through playful engagement with art in the context of their community. The completed mural was to become a visual representation of our diversity as a community and to be used as a banner for the council, an engaging and accessible display of our local community.

Malahang Community Festival is a celebration of the local community and all of its colour and vibrancy, it’s a free public event held once a year in local parklands that aims to celebrate and display the many different aspects of the Banyule community in a fun and inclusive event for all ages and abilities. 

The invitation to facilitate a public mural project at this type of event was exciting, as we believe that community built public art creates an opportunity for us to see ourselves and our stories, reflected in our public spaces, it’s an invitation for community input, perspective, and contribution to the visual landscape of our neighbourhood, a way for us to see ourselves and our stories, reflected in our public spaces. Making art together as a community also creates points of connection as people stand side by side and share the experience of creating together, it is a way of connecting and appreciating individualism and diversity, and can change how people engage in their neighbourhood, how comfortable and welcome diverse populations feel in public spaces.

On the Day of the festival we laid the canvas across a table and invited members of the public to paint a representation of themselves onto the blank faces. We set up a paint station so people could easily access materials and had a team of five community artists to support participation. It was lovely to watch the way people engaged with the work, families coming in to paint together, friends and neighbours sharing time and new connections being made among participants. 

Trepidation is a natural part of any project that invites public participation. People feel unsure about how to engage, our job as facilitators is to be able to meet people where they’re at and offer gentle ways to ease people into the process. We had prepared small “creative Licences” to hand out, which invited a bit of humour into the process which create a small relational moment and often enabled individuals to move pass their trepidation and engage in the project

We had around 200 members of the local community (including one delightful dog!) contribute to this artwork in an energetic and joyous display of community engagement.

Before handing the artwork over to the council, we wanted to find a way to represent the environmental aspect of the community, how much the connection to nature positively contributes to the everyday life of people living in Banyule city council area.

So after the festival we took some time to collect leaves and gum nuts from Malahang park and turned them into stencils which we transposed onto the mural. It was a fitting way to recognise the role that the natural environment has on the wellbeing of people living and working in the area, a tribute to the integral nature of our environment in the community.