101 PHOTOGRAPHS OF WATERFORD STREET ART AND MURALS
When I first encountered several striking murals across Waterford in May 2016, I gave them little extra thought. They appeared sporadic and unconnected—isolated splashes of colour that I assumed were merely random, independent commissions. It was not until my return in July 2017 that the penny finally dropped: an extensive body of work had emerged following the August 2016 festival. Unfortunately, a corrupted SD card left my RAW files from that 2017 trip inaccessible for years.
When structuring my current retrospective programme to document Waterford's murals year by year, I chose the *July 2018* survey as my master reference catalogue—the fixed baseline from which to track the city's walls both forward and back. While I had originally hoped to attend the August 2018 festival, circumstances forced me to visit in July. That timing meant I missed the live painting of the 2018 additions, but it provided an uninterrupted opportunity to systematically record what was already on the ground.
Consequently, the 101 examples documented that summer capture the surviving works from Waterford Walls’ first three editions (2015, 2016, and 2017), alongside a handful of independent commissions outside the festival roster.
In an unexpected breakthrough just a few days ago, after work on this legacy project was already underway, I finally succeeded in recovering those long-lost 2017 RAW files. While it will take a few weeks to fully repair and process them for publication in October 2026, this July 2018 collection remains the definitive anchor for the entire project.
During those formative years, New Street Garden and its immediate environs served as the festival’s creative ground zero, anchoring an impressive concentration of murals across neighbouring gables, lanes, and historic streetscapes:
When structuring my current retrospective programme to document Waterford's murals year by year, I chose the *July 2018* survey as my master reference catalogue—the fixed baseline from which to track the city's walls both forward and back. While I had originally hoped to attend the August 2018 festival, circumstances forced me to visit in July. That timing meant I missed the live painting of the 2018 additions, but it provided an uninterrupted opportunity to systematically record what was already on the ground.
Consequently, the 101 examples documented that summer capture the surviving works from Waterford Walls’ first three editions (2015, 2016, and 2017), alongside a handful of independent commissions outside the festival roster.
In an unexpected breakthrough just a few days ago, after work on this legacy project was already underway, I finally succeeded in recovering those long-lost 2017 RAW files. While it will take a few weeks to fully repair and process them for publication in October 2026, this July 2018 collection remains the definitive anchor for the entire project.
During those formative years, New Street Garden and its immediate environs served as the festival’s creative ground zero, anchoring an impressive concentration of murals across neighbouring gables, lanes, and historic streetscapes:
101 PHOTOGRAPHS