We’ve not seen last of murals with message

Amural painted on awall backing on to the police cell block 18 years ago in the hope of breakingdownthe need for the jailhouse is itself coming down, by demolition.

But while itwas a sadmomentas artist Jan Marie Cook and veteran social justice battler Pat Magill looked at the partly weather-worn artwork for possibly the last time, there wasan appreciation that it could not be saved. Cook, wholed the projectwhenthe mural wentup in 2002, said: “Things change.”

Magill, whoturns 94 this week, will keep on with the mission to “Build communities, not prisons”, as one inscription on the mural says, andvows anewmural will go up, somewhere.

“Whoknows,” said Cook, whenasked if she would be involved again, although history suggests that if Magill is involved she could well go a second round.

“Itwas part of Pat’s initiative for the community,” she said. She’d donesome artwork for himwhenneeded, and found the enthusiasm of the campaigner, his commitment to Napier and to the Pilot City Trust, through which the calls for social change have often been pushed, difficult to resist.

In away which will be familiar to the waypeople have taken to Magill’s purpose over the years, she said: “I only did it because Pat asked.”

Magill had also enlisted the schools of Napier, to get pupils to do theirownart impressions of Napier and its issues.

Cook, whohad been a tutor at EIT, enlisted students “Nathan, Bernard and Shaun” to help in about amonth of bringing colour and meaning to an otherwise staid concrete block wall.

“Itwas like a quilt, with the hands at the end sewing it together,” she said. “It waslike a response to whatwas represented by the holding cells behind it.”

Magill said: “The reason I asked the policewas to bring back a relationship between the community and the police.”

The mural carried messages from the children and the artists, such as “Bullying must be stopped”, “Without a sense of caring there can be no community”, and “canweforget the prejudice formed by society”.

Nowon amission to have Napier

Photo / Paul Taylor A grey day but not so much a cloud of darkness as Pat Magill and Jan Marie Cook visit the site of the mural for possibly the last time before the wall comes down.