Projects
Attainable Homes Calgary
Downtown West · Calgary, Canada
A child draws a house in chalk.
Created for Attainable Homes Calgary, this mural brought that simple act of imagining home onto a building whose own future was uncertain.
The building had previously housed a long-standing family-run furniture business. Its connection to domestic life offered a setting for a painting about shelter and belonging, even as the surrounding downtown neighbourhood was changing.
The child is Mukta, whose parents had immigrated from India and found housing through Attainable Homes Calgary.
I wanted to work with a family connected to the organization. Mukta and her parents were excited to participate, and our photoshoot gave the painting its starting point.
Her presence brought the subject close. The child imagining a home belonged to a family who had been through the process of finding one.
The original proposal was for a relatively small mural near the bottom of the building. Visiting the site, I saw the possibility of working across the structure, wrapping the corner and bringing its connected surfaces into one composition.
The nearby CTrain line, intersection and sidewalks offered different approaches. A face could emerge from one direction, another part of the painting from farther along the street.
The work was made to be encountered in motion. No single photograph quite holds the way it occupied that corner.
I had four days to paint it, working primarily with roller and brush.
The lift barely reached the upper portions of the face. Some passages had to be painted with a pole at full extension, a limitation still visible in their softer definition.
This commission also helped sustain my time in Southern Alberta, where I was working with Dawn Saunders Dahl and members of the Stoney Nakoda Nation on projects in Morley, Canmore and Banff.
Different kinds of work were making one another possible.
The building was demolished not long after the mural was completed.
I return to the image of Mukta drawing her house across its walls: a child imagining somewhere to live, painted on a structure that would soon disappear.
© Jason Botkin