Swannanoa School 150th Jubilee Mural — A New Direction

Swannanoa School 150th jubilee mural — acrylic triptych on MDF, approximately 3.6 metres wide, 2023.

I've spent much of my career working in stone. Painting has always been part of my background. When Swannanoa School approached me to create a mural for their 150th year commemoration, it offered a shift in scale and process.

The work was spread across three large MDF panels, which first needed careful preparation — filling, sanding, sealing, and priming before any design could begin. That stage drew on my painter and decorator background as much as my art training.

From there, the artistic planning took over. The Southern Alps stretch across the horizon as you approach the school, so the design became a triptych, allowing the mountains to run continuously across the three panels. Background colours were laid in first, the full design drawn over the surface, and then the layers began to build.

The completed mural — three panels at approximately 120cm each.

Within the landscape sit the five value sculptures I had created with the school some years earlier — representing community, respect, integrity, kindness, and success — placing them back into the environment they belong to. The four birds representing each hapu cluster are also woven into the design, acknowledging the identity of the different classroom groups.

While I worked on the sky, mountains, and finer detail using airbrush, small groups of students rotated through the project — two at a time on each panel — painting the foreground foliage. The plants were colour-coded so they could confidently work within defined areas, learning to cut in carefully and stay within the lines. Each group spent around forty minutes contributing to the piece, adding their own hands to the surface of the mural.

The mural in context on the school building exterior.

Working at this scale, across three metres of wall, combining airbrush detail with structured student participation, required a different rhythm than stone carving. But at its heart, it followed the same principle I bring to all school projects — careful planning, shared ownership, and a finished work the students can recognise themselves in.

The mural now forms part of Swannanoa School's 150-year story, connecting landscape, values, and student contribution in one unified piece. It stands as a marker of the school's place within its wider environment — the Southern Alps behind it, the community around it, and generations of students whose efforts are literally in the paint.

Every project needs its own kind of signature. This one carries both mine and theirs.