‘Your Dreams Ignite Your Journey’ a mural spanning the history of transport and those who use it. Church Road, Filton

Wrapping around the entire expanse of a brick-built toilet block, this mural celebrates the travel heritage of Filton. Community workshops, supported by FACE, helped inspire the design, which is packed with imaginative details and nods to the area’s history. The mural is part of a wider refurbishment scheme for this mobility hub space, on Church Road, in the heart of Filton. Commissioned by West of England Combined Authority the refurbishment will also include bike and e-scooter parking, planters, seating and an information totem.

The artwork tells the story of a prehistoric family inventing their own myths as to what the future of transport could be. A mother and her child draw on cave walls, while a father cares for a baby by a campfire. As you move around the mural the campfire smoke guides you towards a timeline of diverse travellers.

Above the colourful parade of people are a sequence of the many modes of transport in use from ancient Briton through to the present day.

A repeated phrase ‘Your Dreams Ignite Your Journey’ underlines the power of imagination and highlights how humans have always dreamed up inventive ways of getting from ‘A to B’.

Further details in the artwork include the depiction of Concorde, and the opening of the nearby Pegasus House building in 1936.

My thanks to painting assistants: Ailish Beadle, Hannah Worsley, Jess Knights, Kirsty Carrington, Sarah Dowling, Sonja Burniston and Tanith Gould.

Team photo by: Monika Frączek / featuring Lucky the dog

Workshops / Engagement.

In order to involve the local community and help inform the design work I led a series of workshops in Filton, with the support of FACE charity and St. Peters Church. Over four creative workshops, with varying ages, needs and abilities, I explored themes of nature, movement and time travel.

Participants walked around the immediate area of the mobility hub, collecting items from nature, which we used as inspiration for various creative outcomes. This ‘nature’ session concluded with stamping “tattoos” on a large giant representation of a prehistoric person.

This conclusion directly informed the interpretation of the prehistoric characters, while the nature experiments helped inspire some of the natural shapes found elsewhere in the mural design.

The movement workshop presented a huge number of ways to bring physical movement into art creation. The joyful approach of the attendees and the fluid motion and outcomes of this workshop helped inspire the flow and feel of the people in the mural artwork.

The time travel workshop asked its attendees to draw how they’d traveled to the venue. We discussed how people have been traveling in various different ways - in the local area - for hundreds of years. I then asked them to imagine themselves as time travelers and they drew the various characters they met in different time periods. These drawings directly inspired the characters in the mural design.