Thinking Outside the Box with Mud Graffiti

By Erin Glover

For two consecutive spring weekends in early May, VIBE Arts was the artful inhabitant of a shipping container at Evergreen Brickworks, engaging hundreds of children, families and visitors in creative play. The container, titled the ‘Think Outside Box’, is positioned as a temporary outdoor art installation at the Brickworks for the spring and summer months. Our activation reimagined the container as a seedpod in springtime; with a hard exterior shell and the inner energies of a seed’s interior. We used the exterior walls as the canvas for an ecological mud graffiti mural. Visitors were invited to work under the guidance of VIBE Arts’ artists to draw and paint using raw clay slip, brushes and stencils. The interior walls became a magnetic Natural Living Poetry Wall that used text and images mounted onto magnetized recycled cardboard cut-outs to express springtime narratives. A selection of spring themed words, such as rain, lilacs, and local natural elements such as indigenous plants were the fodder for our poetry wall. VIBE Arts’ artists worked through many variations of springtime weather and had tons of fun helping the art grow and change from day to day.