City of Music

Considered Adelaide's biggest mural, the artwork references the many artists, venues and events that recognises the city's music scene and development of talented musicians. It also honours UNESCO's designation of Adelaide as the City of Music in 2015. The visual representation of the work was a lengthy process to pin down, which was aided through interviews, research and collaboration.

In thinking about how I was going to possibly represent something as big and complex as music in Adelaide over time, I started with a process of elimination. I decided it couldn’t be an image of any individual people, musical instruments or buildings - or anything that would be restrictive or exclude people that weren’t directly represented. Any kind of direct representation could never do justice to the breadth of what it needs to be.

Through taking these things and abstracting them they’re able to refer directly to where they come from, and then also be something larger than that. For example, the big black and green circles at the top of the wall are an abstraction of a music street magazine logo - this can refer to that magazine specifically, that particular issue of the mag - which was in the collection of Peter Tilbrook, or it can be representative of all music street press. Also, being a round black shape, it can look like a vinyl record, or concentric circles could be sound waves emanating from a speaker.