Impact
What the work keeps doing
Duration is the medium. A co-created public artwork goes on working after the gathering ends: it is installed, maintained, carried, argued over, and met by people who were never in the room. What follows is the aftermath of each participatory mural, described at the level it operates on.
Where the work is now
Custodianship
Where each painting is now, and who holds it.
- The Belonging Action remains on the east wall of the Harbour Centre parkade at 350 W Cordova Street, Vancouver, fourteen years after it was painted, and is recorded in the City of Vancouver’s Public Art Registry.
- The travelling mural from the Lummi totem pole journeys is held by the House of Tears Carvers, whose journey it accompanied.
- Connected in Chaos is installed in the Richmond Street underpass in London, Ontario, on the route the residents who voted for it use.
- Out of Our Minds was hung as the backdrop for a district educators’ conference in Nanaimo, where Sir Ken Robinson spoke in front of it.
- The Brescia centennial painting still stands in a courtyard at the university, now part of Western University, in London, Ontario.
- Three of the five Granddaughters Murals panels are displayed at the Nature House in Stanley Park, Vancouver. The Stanley Park Ecology Society’s 2025 and 2026 annual reports describe an ongoing process of reconciliation with the mural artists and with the Musqueam, Squamish and Tsleil-Waututh Nations.
- Art in a Just Recovery hangs at the Guelph Farmers’ Market, where the neighbourhoods that made it pass it each week.
Concentric
Six levels, from the self outward
Audiences for work like this are not one public but nested groups, at different distances and with different degrees of authorship: the people who set the question, the people who painted, the people at the unveiling, the people who pass the wall, and the people who only ever hear about it and carry it as a story. The last circle is the one a permanent mural addresses for decades.
The self
Participatory painting reshapes a person’s inner landscape by turning private emotion, memory and identity into visible form that is witnessed and co-authored. As people mix colour, choose imagery and leave their mark alongside others, they externalise previously unspoken parts of themselves, and often discover agency, resilience and a clearer sense of their own narrative. The process can quiet internal fragmentation, build self-efficacy through tangible making, and foster a more coherent self-concept, grounded both in solitary reflection and in the validating presence of shared making.
Between people
In the space between people, whether face to face or mediated through digital platforms, participatory painting acts as a non-verbal bridge that softens isolation and builds mutual recognition. Collaborative mark-making invites vulnerability, the negotiation of space and meaning, and the slow cultivation of trust. Online extensions, shared digital canvases, photographic documentation, video calls around a mural, carry those bonds across distance, letting relationships form and deepen through co-creation whether or not people are in the room at the same time. The result is a weave of connection in which participants experience being seen, and seeing others, more fully.
In a community
At the community level, participatory painting works as both mirror and catalyst. Collective images surface shared histories, tensions and aspirations that might otherwise stay latent, while the act of painting together becomes an experiment in how an ideal community might feel, raising the bar on what we can imagine is possible. Public walls, community centres and temporary installations become sites of belonging where residents claim space, negotiate difference and rehearse solidarity. Over time these projects strengthen informal networks, increase civic pride, and leave visible evidence that a community is capable of jointly authoring its own environment.
Across systems
Viewed through a systems lens, participatory painting works as connective tissue across institutions: schools, nonprofits, municipal agencies, health services, cultural organisations and businesses. It makes interdependencies usable. Partners align educational goals with public health messages, pool funding, and share staff, space and audiences that siloed structures rarely move. Treating the work as a shared system rather than a finished object builds that capacity into the process itself. Negotiating surface area, layering colour over someone else’s marks and deciding together how funds are distributed make cooperation the operating rule, and leave relationships and resource pathways that outlast the painting.
In the culture
Culturally, socially engaged participatory painting both preserves and transforms collective meaning. Participants draw on inherited visual languages, symbols and aesthetic traditions while hybridising them with contemporary experience, migration stories and local vernaculars. The resulting works become living archives that contest dominant narratives, assert cultural continuity under pressure, and generate new hybrid forms that future generations can inherit and reinterpret. The practice functions as cultural production and cultural critique at once, expanding what counts as legitimate public culture, and who is authorised to shape it.
In the spiritual realm
From a spiritual perspective, participatory painting opens a shared field of presence in which making becomes a contemplative and relational practice. People turn stories into images, decide what a mark means, and watch someone else’s story take shape beside their own. That exchange can induce flow, humility and interconnectedness. Neuroscience explains why, without requiring any particular belief: sustained creative attention quiets the brain’s default mode network, while joint attention to a shared image, and the synchrony of working side by side, increase interbrain synchrony and release oxytocin. Witnessing another person’s story on the same surface adds a further layer, recruiting the networks involved in empathy and meaning-making. What results is a felt sense of something larger than the isolated self, and the reminder that meaning and care can be co-created in the material world.
Evidence
The six levels, photographed
Published elsewhere
Other people writing about this work
- Celeste Pang, Brittany A. E. Jakubiec and Melanie Schambach, “Relational Practices in Arts-Based Research: A Roundtable Reflection on the Fostering Dialogues Project”, Atlantis: Critical Studies in Gender, Culture and Social Justice 45.2, 2024, 173 to 179.
- Peggy O’Neil, Roula Kteily-Hawa and Marlene Janzen Le Ber, “Social Portraiture: Decolonizing Ways of Knowing in Education through Arts-Based Participatory Action Research”, Canadian Journal of Action Research 22.3, 2022.
- Gregory Lowan-Trudeau, From Reticence to Resistance, Werklund School of Education, 2018.
- Liz Miller, The Shore Line: A Totem Pole Journey, SSHRC Canada, 2014.