The Hillview Community Art Project held two design workshops at the Hillview Hub run by lead artist Nick Zafir, where participants were invited to create a collaborative mural design.

At the workshops, the participants brainstormed ideas and responses to prompts from the City of Canning and the Cultural Ambassador Group's initial brief for the project. The prompts included themes such as ‘home’, ‘food’, ‘music’, ‘something/someone important to you’, ‘'how do we welcome or greet people to our homes’, and ‘what makes us feel connected to our suburb’. These activities enabled the participants to explore different ways of thinking and generate ideas for their mural.

Nick explained that his approach to creating collaborative community murals was to focus on the commonalities and identify shared elements amongst different members of the community.

The next activity involved creating an intercultural collage to help understand the approach and mindset of mixing different elements and ideas. During this activity, the participants created their own mock-up of what the mural could look like. We then looked at all of the mock-ups together to find the similarities between them.

The community decided to go through the Cultural Explosion model, which is a way of creating art that blends different cultures, bringing them together in a harmonious way. The use of strong colours was a common feature that connected everything. People also liked the flexibility of not having a rigid border as the organic look and feel better represented the adopted intercultural approach.

Collaboration requires each person to contribute but also to let go of controlling the end outcome, allowing it to be part of the bigger picture and be shaped and changed by the whole group.

The Hillview Community Art Project aligns with CAN’s strategic goal of creating work that builds intercultural connections and understanding between different cultural communities in Western Australia.