The Sea Level Rise mural on the City of Cape Town Law Enforcement building at Fish Hoek Beach will be undergoing a much-needed revamp in the coming months, as the artwork has become weathered due to the coastal environment.
Kim Kruyshaar and Patrick Dowling, two environmental activists, initiated a project that resulted in the creation of the original mural almost three years ago by CareCreative artist Claire Homewood. Margaret Stone and Liesbet Joubert, two teachers at Fish Hoek High School, facilitated the painting process.
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Sea Level Rise was unveiled on Friday, 23 April 2021, at a cultural event attended by Fish Hoek High students, City officials and other participants in the project.
The mural depicts the nearby beach and mountainscape, as well as two projected future sea level lines. Portraits of people of various ages in an 80-year lifespan depict people getting wet and experiencing the rising sea level, a well-understood, predicted, and finely calculated phenomenon caused by planetary heating.
Because of its position close to the shore, the mural has started to show signs of weathering.
Last week, Claire Homewood, Fish Hoek High School students and FHHS visual arts educator Margaret Stone discussed the best way to renew the mural with Patrick Dowling of the Wildlife and Environment Society of South Africa (Wessa) and students from Sandy’s School in Kommetjie.
‘The original mural was a collaborative effort with the school, and the youth from the far south were involved in the process,’ Kruyshaar explained to News24.
‘In the concept of change, the coastline is one of the places where you are going to see change the fastest because you get one big storm and there is massive erosion,’ she added.
Homewood, the artist behind the mural, said an updated version of the original mural would take shape with the ideas behind change and resilience.
‘We are working with the ideas and metaphors behind the change and growing our resilience and adaptability to change because the elements are changing, and humans are causing change,’ she told News24.
She went on to say that both the mural’s original design and the updated version are about change, and while the original mural was about rising sea levels, it is now about climate change and its consequences.
‘We are in a changing climate, environmentally, socially and physically, so it’s kind of also speaking to a bigger environment of how we want to change and how we want to be more conscious about what change happens,’ she explained to News24.
‘Also, how we work together, how we engage with the City, how we engage in conversation with environmentalists and people that are doing the thinking in terms of how change could not be scary but actually something positive and exciting,’ she added.
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Picture: City of Cape Town / Facebook