Shelley Gardens Mural (ongoing)
The Shelley Gardens mural has been commissioned by Cardiff Council as part of the wider Shelley Gardens Park Redevelopment Programme. It is being created through a collaborative design process involving local residents, community groups and park users.
Through a series of creative workshops, participants explored the park through drawing. Using simple mark-making activities inspired by leaves, flowers, seed heads, textures and natural forms, they created hundreds of small studies that capture the character of Shelley Gardens.
These drawings now form the foundation of the final artwork.
Community Engagement
The sessions were designed to be informal, creative and accessible. No previous artistic experience was required, with many people staying for just a few minutes while others spent much longer exploring the activities.
Over the course of seven workshops, more than 50 local people took part, including:
Plasnewydd Community Garden volunteers
YMCA Y Plas young people and staff
Local residents and families
Regular park users
Exploring the drawings
Following the workshops, drawings from each participant have been reviewed and organised into themes. Rather than selecting only a handful of favourites, the aim is to identify recurring shapes, colours and visual ideas that appeared across many participants' work.
These include:
Flowers and petals
Leaves and stems
Seed pods and fruits
Surface textures and repeating patterns
Organic forms and movement
Geometric and architectural shapes
Abstract marks and colour combinations
Where several people explored similar ideas, these have been combined into shared visual motifs. This allows as many participants as possible to be represented within the finished mural.
Building the ‘initial composition’
The next stage involves creating a large collage from the workshop drawings.
Individual studies are layered, cropped, rotated and combined to explore how they might sit together across the length of the wall.
At this stage the artwork remains closely connected to the original workshop outputs. The aim is to understand how hundreds of individual observations can become one continuous composition.
Developing the initial artwork
Once the overall composition has been established, the design begins to evolve into a mural. The workshop drawings are carefully redrawn and simplified, creating a more unified visual language while retaining the character of the original contributions.
Rather than copying the workshop drawings exactly, the final artwork celebrates them by preserving their distinctive shapes, patterns and energy within a cohesive composition.
The mural will use a deliberately limited colour palette and bold layered forms to create a design that is vibrant, durable and clearly readable from a distance.
First Mock-up
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First Mock-up -
Demonstrating community influence
An important part of this project is showing how local contributions have influenced the final artwork. Alongside the completed design, I hope to produce a visual map illustrating how workshop drawings have been incorporated into the mural. This will help show the journey from individual sketches to finished artwork and celebrate the contribution made by local residents. I'm also exploring subtle ways of incorporating the first names of participants into the design itself, creating another layer of community ownership within the mural.