Life at No.22, Snapshots of Tauranga

Snapshots of Tauranga #24

Suzanne

Street Art – weaving stories into our cityscape

Many people, myself included, believe that public art is established to enrich all our lives with cultural identity, provide an economic boost to our local areas and visual beauty, and build art communities within those areas.

As people know, Tauranga City is experiencing a much-needed overall, ridding itself of dreary and unusable buildings and moving to a new architecturally designed urban landscape, from fewer cranes to near-completion buildings. In the meantime, our city centre is buzzing with artistic energy and revitalising unused buildings and walls with their individual artworks.

One street with a less than colourful name, Grey Street, is being transformed with a new mural – a slice of nature created by artist Lily Ivana. Her love of nature, recently seen through her child’s eyes, has renewed the magic and energy of nature. She has created a sense of calm with the recognisable bush track artwork.

This work will be finished in time for the Tauranga Street Art Festival, a 3-day festival, which I look forward to enjoying in March of this year. After this event, I will show you the creation.

In the meantime, I want to share other works worth viewing around Tauranga and Mount Maunganui.

Another Grey Street mural was created by Fintan Magee, a Sydney-based social realist painter.

Magee creates from personal experience and the mundane. His figurative paintings are deeply integrated with the urban environment and explore themes of waste, consumption, loss, transition, and the environment. They also contain a sentimentality and softness influenced by children’s books and the Low Brow art movement.

Demolition and another area destined for a new city centre laneway connecting Grey Street and Durham Street. I’m unsure whether the art will exist when that project starts?

He describes the above mural as a guy building a wall around himself and blocking himself away. It’s a reaction to growing Trumpism in Australia and New Zealand, the whole ‘build a wall’ and ‘stop the boats’ mentality.

It’s very cleverly integrating a political cartoon disguised as a portrait.

Flox

Untitled by Flox can be found at Mount Maunganui.

The theme of creating the above mural resonated with Flox: “He Tangata, He Tangata, He Tangata.” It is the people, the people, the people.

For Flox, the most important people in her world are her children. This piece is a portrait of one child adorned with a flying Kotare (Kingfisher), representing his middle name.

During Flox’s research into local legends of Mauao (Mt Maunganui), she came across one about the Patupaiarehe – local forest fairies that were thought to have dragged Mauao out to the position in which he sits now. The Patupaiarehe were also considered to be fair-skinned with red hair. Another reason she chose to use her son as her muse for this mural.

Untitled created by Flox – the full version

I will hopefully share more creative street art in between other musings and life, as it’s fun to find them around town.

Find below other posts about street art we have discovered while looking down and around.

Portugal Street Art – Rough and Smooth
Have you seen Tauranga Street Art?
ARty Lisbon – A REvisit
Serendipitous Pavement Art – New York

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Published by Suzanne

I'm a lover of creativity and movement, expressed through photography, words, travel and sports. . . . . . .

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