I have had the pleasure of partaking in the making of many murals. Here are some that I have designed myself and have created with the help of others for community wellbeing and engagement projects.
January-June 2017: At Hope Home in Chiang Mai, Thailand, I gifted the foster care home for disabled children a mural via Art Relief International, to honor the rainbow of children that Hope Home has served. Hope Home is a non-profit foster care home for children with severe intellectual and physical disabilities. About half of these children are no longer with us, so this piece also stands as a memorial. Usually, ARI creates a mural for each new building Hope Home grows into. Learn more about Hope Home here: https://hopehomecm.wordpress.com/
April 2017: In Pai, Thailand, near the eastern border of Myanmar, Art Relief International created 3 murals in 2 days with over 40 Burmese migrant children.
The students' range from 4-17, and are cared for by the non-profit organization called Kwah Dao (kwahdao.org). The name means "to reach for the stars"--the idea behind our 3 murals.
2 small murals were facilitated for the younger children. They had a hands-on experience in color mixing and paint application, as supported by their elder peers--who primed the colored backgrounds for them.
Every child created their own multimedia star to add to the Kwah Dao constellation.
The older students created this 2x3 meter canvas mural. Step by step, my Art Relief International team and I taught the students how to properly match and mix color appropriately, paint wet-on-wet in a gradient, stencil and outline their painted work, adhere multimedia aspects in an archival way, and more.
Komorebi
In 2015, I designed and created this mural with the help of friends from the organization MESBUR (Men's Emotional Break-Up Recovery Initiative) in Cork City, Ireland. The mural is called "Komorebi," the Japanese word for the phenomenon of looking up and seeing light beams between the leaves of a tree. This mural offers a visual metaphor for the uplifting, emotional work that happens in this facility. All are welcome to use this space. Check it out at: https://www.facebook.com/mesburshandon
"Komorebi"
August 2014: This mural is the backdrop to an up-cycled plastic demon (not pictured) that this group of Chiang Mai youth made. They were inspired to reduce and reuse the single-use plastic from their environment by turning it into material for an original, conceptual sculpture. The painted mural scenery for their plastic demon helped to convey the story about the demon rising--out of the mountains of plastic in a landfill to come into our cities and villages to warn us about the dangers of single-use plastic. We adhered extra plastic pieces to the wall to create an extra 3D aspect to our mural, as well.
