In September 2020, I created a 90 m² wildlife mural at the Park & Ride in Greystones, County Wicklow. Commissioned by the Wicklow Arts Office for Culture Night 2020, it was my first large-scale mural project and an opportunity to take my wildlife illustration practice from the page onto a very different canvas.
Greystones is a seaside town, so the concept naturally centred on the marine wildlife of the Irish Sea. The mural features a selection of species including a basking shark, common seal, bottlenose dolphin, crab, tuna, cormorant, seahorse and jellyfish.
Many of these animals are familiar to us in photographs, documentaries, or wildlife books, but people rarely see them standing on the shore. Even species that occasionally appear close to the Irish coast, such as basking sharks and dolphins, spend most of their lives beyond our everyday view.
I wanted the mural to bring this hidden marine world into an ordinary public space. The animals emerge across the large wall as a reminder that the landscape around us continues beneath the surface, and that the Irish coastline and surrounding seas support a much richer variety of life than we might realise.
That idea of making unseen wildlife visible continues to interest me in my work. Wildlife illustration can communicate biodiversity in places where people don't necessarily expect to encounter it, whether through a mural, an interpretation board, an educational publication or a book.
Working at this scale was a completely different experience from working on paper. At 90 m², the illustrations needed to be bold enough to read from a distance while retaining enough detail and character to reward people who stopped to look more closely. It was also a very physical process, requiring long days of painting and constant movement between different sections of the wall.
Fortunately, September 2020 brought exceptionally good weather, allowing me to work for 11-12 hours a day and complete the mural in less than two weeks.
As my first mural, the project was both a significant creative challenge and an important milestone in my development as a wildlife artist. It opened another dimension of my practice, showing how natural-history illustration can translate into large-scale public art and place-based environmental storytelling.
I’m particularly interested in creating wildlife murals that celebrate local biodiversity, communicate environmental stories and give people an unexpected encounter with the natural world in their everyday surroundings.
And I made it! :D
— Aga Grandowicz (@AgaGrandowicz) September 25, 2020
Video showing my large mural in Greystones, commissioned by Wicklow Arts Office / Wicklow CoCo. A delightful experience and I'm so pleased with the local community's terrific response - thank you all, it's been a pleasure :) pic.twitter.com/gdBRjqF2CZ
Here's a video showing the work in progress on the mural.
