Richmond pedestrians and cyclists will be greeted by a colourful new mural when walking and cycling under the Salisbury Road underpass.
The Tasman District Council held a youth forum throughout lockdown and encouraged young people from around the region to send in their thoughts and what they were feeling.
Tasman District Council community partnerships officer Yulia Panfylova says that youth voice is important.
“Young people need to be able to speak and to be heard, that is really important.”
Stef Naldi and Cristina Rule, both art students from NMIT, were involved in the First Taste festival in Richmond last year. The pair ran an art project for children at the festival and got in touch with Yulia.
“When this opportunity came around she got in touch,” says Cristina.
“This was an initiative from youth organisation around the top of the south, when we ask young people to tell us how they were feeling. We collected the messages, and we decided that we wanted to use these messages somehow,” Yulia says.
She got in touch with Cristina and Stef and got them to design a mural based on those messages.
“There were some common threads coming through,” Cristina says.
The common theme was that young people really need nurturing, but that they need space to grow as well.
“To us, that reminded us of what it was like in the bush, where the seedlings need the protection of the large trees, but they still need the light coming through to flourish.”
They used the native bush analogy but added a splash of colour to make things more vibrant.
“To us, we needed some bold colours, because youth is vibrancy and diversity.”
Members of the community have been following with keen interest as well.
Over the last two weeks, while the pair of artists were designing and painting the mural, which now covers the underpass near the Richmond Aquatic centre underneath Salisbury road, locals have been stopping in every day to check on the progress, and to see how the process unfolds.
“People were checking in every day on us, we had some great feedback from the community while we were painting.”