Projects
Commissioned for Freak Lunchbox in downtown Halifax, this mural arrived during a surprisingly tense civic moment.
The previous wall had carried a beloved local image for years, and its removal triggered an immediate public reaction. Before the mural was even fully underway, criticism, suspicion, and hostility surrounded the project from multiple directions — online, in the street, and throughout the downtown core.
For the first few days of painting, the wall became less a mural than a public conversation unfolding in real time.
But something shifted.
As the image emerged from a nearly black underpainting into colour, the tone around the project began changing as well. Curiosity replaced hostility. Conversations replaced assumptions. By the final days of production, many of the same people initially resistant to the mural had become deeply supportive of it.
What began as controversy eventually became one of the most widely recognized works of my career — receiving national media coverage, international circulation, and strong local affection.
Years later, the mural itself disappeared behind new development.
In many ways, the piece became a mural about transformation that was eventually transformed itself.
The mural explored a surreal marine ecosystem unfolding across the surface of the building — a collision of sea life, drifting forms, candy-coloured atmospheres, and exaggerated scale relationships tied loosely to Halifax’s deep relationship with the Atlantic.
Rather than approaching the wall through realism or direct environmental messaging, I wanted the piece to feel more dreamlike and emotionally porous — something suspended between underwater ecology, memory, carnival, and urban mythology.
The visual language intentionally leaned playful and accessible from a distance, while revealing stranger symbolic details the longer viewers spent with it.
This layered readability became important to the project itself.
People often approached the mural assuming they already understood it — only to slowly renegotiate that relationship over time. In retrospect, that dynamic mirrored the public response surrounding the wall from the beginning.
One of the lasting lessons from this project was the reminder that murals do not enter neutral environments.
Especially in cities undergoing rapid change, even a brightly coloured mural can become entangled in deeper anxieties surrounding identity, development, belonging, and cultural continuity.
What interested me most was not “winning” that public debate, but watching how quickly perception itself could shift through repeated exposure, dialogue, and lived encounter.
The mural slowly stopped being an interruption and became part of the emotional geography of the street.
The eventual disappearance of the mural behind new construction added an unexpected final chapter to the project.
At the time of painting, much of the public conversation revolved around fears of cultural erasure and urban transformation. Years later, the mural itself became partially erased by the same evolving city forces surrounding it from the beginning.
There is something strangely fitting in that.
Public art lives inside time, not outside it.
Sometimes the disappearance of a mural becomes part of the work’s meaning too.
Years after the mural was completed, I spent roughly eighty hours redrawing the entire wall from stitched photographic reference.
Rather than reproducing the mural alone, the drawing preserves the place that held it: the exposed brick, broken parging, climbing ivy, tree canopy, and night sky that formed part of the work’s character.
Part documentation, part reconstruction, the print has become a trace of a mural—and a corner of Halifax—that no longer exists quite the same way today.
A print is in the works.
Hoping to make it available for the holiday season. Interested?
Get in touch and I’ll let you know when it’s ready.
Related project
© Jason Botkin