Lakkos Mural

I created this mural for the Lakkos Project as part of my Artist Residency in Heraklion, Crete. Lakkos is the oldest neighbourhood in Heraklion and used to have a bad reputation for being unsafe. The Lakkos project aims to rejuvinate the area by allowing artists to create a mural trail- thus creating a tourist attractrion, brightening up public areas, and breathing a new artistic identity into this once avoided part of town.

The design of my mural was inspired by my visits to museums of archeology on Crete but also in Athens.

I fell in love with partially broken statues where the face was still somewhat visible.

Nature taking over dilapidated buildings was a focus of mine during my residency and informed all of my final outcomes, so I had no shortage of images of foliage pouring over the edges of man made structures and taking over them like a jungle.

During my time in Heraklion, giant cranes dominated the city sky line, rising higher than the Orthodox Church domes. Speaking with locals, I learned that there was little respect for historical buildings in the city centre and often they would be left to rot beyond repair, or knocked down and built on top of.

I decided to try and reflect this constantly evolving skyline in my mural and depict a push and pull battle between man and nature, history and innovation.

The thread tying all of these concepts together was the inclusion of myself in the piece, I used myself as a reference for the broken statue, and suddenly-  the busy city and all of the cascading plants were pouring out of my own head. In short, My impression of Heraklion is embodied in this mural.

Many locals witnessed me creating the mural, and stopped to tell me it was beautiful, which was lovely.

One man said that the inclusion of the crane really spoke to him, he was upset about a local green space being turned into a building.

Someone else told me that the washing line with drying clothes was the most important part of the mural to them, because this symbolised the poor people of Heraklion.

The inclusion of a pink lemon tree is a joke referring to the duolingo app- one of the first phrases it teaches you when you are learning greek is “to limoni enai roz”

Heraklion, Crete, 2022.