Mural Metamorphosis:
Tracing the Enchanting Evolution of a Little Girl’s room …
Watermelon Wishes…
Way back in 2016 when we were expecting our little girl Bridie, we had so much fun painting. In fact, painting was kind of the theme of the entire pregnancy for me (Caroline)! Matt and I bought some plywood and for some reason still quite unknown to me we painted a giant watermelon to decorate her nursery!
There were so many paintings that I ended up producing my very first SALA Exhibition titled ‘She’ in honour of the little girl I was excited to meet! And following that being an artist kind of took over my life! Lots of exciting things happened, the cover of SA Weekend, Four shortlists for the Fringe Poster Design and one Runner Up, being chosen as one of 5 Female Artists to watch for International Womens Day in 2017 among other exciting things. You could say I was living the dream, and then Covid hit. The company I’d started (which was the first mobile Paint and Sip in SA) couldn’t operate and so we packed up and moved to Stansbury to live!
It was lovely to be welcomed by the Yorke Peninsula Community, thanking Kristen Murdock for this lovely article.
With no opportunities at the time for art lessons I started doing zoom art classes and lives on instagram with Bridie. It was a lot of fun. But I wanted to paint more. So one day, while Matt was conveniently away at work (and unable to tell me I couldn’t paint the wall) I did a mural on Bridie’s bedroom wall!
Fairly sure she liked it!
This mural was painted in the bunk room of Uncle Matthews, I was just learning about murals and how different types of paint reacted on a wall compared to a canvas! A year or two later I was bored again so I decided to update her room!
The next piece was more elaborate and bold!
As the world started opening up again, the art world did too! Yorke Peninsula embraced me with open arms, for which I’ll be forever grateful. People in the Community who became dear friends supported me to work within the community. I ended up painting the mural in the Playroom at The Dalrymple (you can visit that one!) and another local cafe (which sadly closed). I worked as an Artist in Residence at Warooka Primary School as part of their Rewilding of Southern Yorke Peninsula Program and other cool events with Nature Play SA.
All this painting ended up in my little company (called Brush at the time and eventually rebranded to Paint Mentality) forcing us back to Adelaide, as I couldn’t physically keep up with demand for events from our home in Stansbury. So, we made the very tough decision to move back to Adelaide. We packed up our then three-year-old and returned to a place she didn’t really remember! Once again to make the house a home, we painted a mural in her bedroom (can you see the recurring theme here!)
As you can see a trend developed where to celebrate, to remember or to create core memories we would use art. So, it was only natural that when we were deciding how to style Uncle Matthews, we chose art once more.
We hope that you create some core memories with your loved ones too!
