THE HISTORY OF THE UNSIGNED MURAL
THE BOOK CENTRE COLLABORATION MURAL AS IT WAS IN AUGUST 2017 [THE FULL CONTEXT]
This post documents the 2017 Book Centre collaboration mural in its original state. The nearby solo mural on the former Finders Keepers building is examined in a separate post, following its overpainting by Mr Cenz in August 2026. The 2017 Book Centre wall was replaced during a subsequent edition of the festival, and that newer piece remains intact.
For over a decade, Waterford has undergone a quiet, colourful transformation. Through the annual Waterford Walls festival, Ireland’s oldest city has systematically turned neglected gable ends, service lanes, and forgotten facades into an evolving open-air gallery. Every August, Irish and international artists arrive to apply fresh layers of paint across the city centre, leaving works that quickly become part of the everyday urban fabric.
Yet street murals are living entities, vulnerable to time, weather, and property redevelopment. Their narratives rarely end when the scaffolding comes down. The intertwined trajectories of two murals created during the August 2017 festival—one on the wall of The Book Centre near the Central Library, and another just around the corner—illustrate the delicate, often brutal ephemerality of public art.
A Tale of Two Flawed Canvases: August 2017
The third edition of Waterford Walls in 2017 contended with relentless summer downpours. Festival documentation and local memory both recall days dominated by torrential rain, which made drying times unpredictable and working on ladders treacherous.
Against this wet backdrop, two distinct pieces took shape on Little Patrick Street:
The Book Centre Collaboration: A joint piece by French street artist ADOR and Irish artist SHUK, painted directly onto the prominent rendered wall of The Book Centre.
The Finders Keepers Solo Wall: A standalone, signed mural by SHUK situated nearby at Number 16.
Each piece carried an inherent vulnerability from the start—one rooted in administrative ambiguity, the other in the commercial volatility of the high street.
The Book Centre Wall: Spontaneity, Weather, and Local Lore
The collaboration between ADOR and SHUK quickly became a local landmark. However, it entered the festival archive without a formal artist signature.
According to festival organisers at the time, the persistent rain simply prevented the artists from completing the final signing before departure. Yet conversations with local residents and business neighbours between 2017 and 2026 suggest a more colourful alternative: that the piece was a spontaneous, late-night collaboration executed without formal festival sign-off, with the severe weather offering convenient cover for its unsigned status.
Whether an approved work cut short by rain or an unsanctioned burst of creative opportunism, the mural survived for years thanks to the goodwill of the building’s owners. It sat comfortably alongside the Central Library quarter, accepted by passers-by as a cornerstone of the 2017 festival trail.
The Contextual Foil: The Finders Keepers Mural
To understand why the Book Centre wall’s eventual replacement mattered, one must look at SHUK’s solo piece on Number 16 Little Patrick Street. Completed and fully signed in August 2017, this mural became inextricably tied to commercial retail when the independent gift shop Finders Keepers opened inside the building three months later, in November 2017.
The shop, founded by Lisa Connolly, became a vibrant fixture of the street, surviving the disruption of pandemic lockdowns. However, the relentless strain of modern independent retail led to its closure in 2024. Compounding the issue, the structure had previously been caught in protracted municipal Compulsory Purchase Order (CPO) deliberations for wider city-centre regeneration.
While the property owner successfully contested the CPO, the building fell into prolonged commercial limbo. When renovation work finally commenced for incoming commercial tenants, practical building requirements took precedence over art preservation: modern window apertures were punched through the exterior masonry, permanently mutilating the painted figure. By August 2026, the scarred remnants were officially erased when London artist Mr Cenz was commissioned to paint an entirely new piece across the facade.
Erasure and Renewal: The Fate of the Library Wall
Unlike the structural destruction of the Finders Keepers wall, the Book Centre collaboration met its end through the natural curatorial cycle of the festival itself. In August 2021, the ADOR and SHUK piece was cleanly overpainted with a new, fully sanctioned festival mural by the creative duo Maker & Land (architect Andrew Land and designer Aaron Maker). That replacement has held the wall ever since.
Discussions with festival staff during subsequent visits shed light on the mechanics behind that transition. Guides were often visibly hesitant to delve into the history of the 2017 collaboration, preferring to direct attention to the compromised Finders Keepers wall down the lane (now no longer an option). When pressed on how replacement walls are selected, staff acknowledged that unsigned works or those lacking clear administrative paper trails from earlier festival editions naturally sit higher on the list for programmatic renewal. Its unofficial reputation, while charming in folklore, made it an uncomplicated surface to reallocate when Maker & Land arrived for the 2021 festival programme.
The Transience of Public Art
The divergent fates of both 2017 pieces underscore the two distinct ways street art vanishes from the urban landscape:
Commercial and physical intervention: Where retail turnover and architectural alterations disfigure a wall without regard for the artwork.
Curatorial turnover: Where the festival ecosystem itself consumes older pieces to make space for incoming artists.
The architectural and stylistic separation across the wall indicates two distinct, adjoining works:
Left Section (Blue Palette): Features an ice-blue, stylised female portrait rendered in a smooth, high-contrast airbrush/spray finish, extending across the left wall face with dripping vertical cyan wash textures and a floating feather motif.
Right Section (Monochrome & Earth Tones): Rendered in a charcoal-grey, woodcut/sketch aesthetic with fine line work, featuring a giant hand grasping autumn leaves and a second female portrait framed by brown and copper leaf fragments.
Physical & Visual Boundary: The vertical dividing line falls directly in the middle of the lower recess (just right of the centre doorway), where the light cyan wash abruptly meets the dark grey, vertical-grain background.
The piece is a split, dual-artist collaboration with each artist commanding their own distinct palette, technique, and half of the facade.
ADOR
Style & Background: A prolific French illustrator and street artist based in Nantes, ADOR is known for his satirical, narrative-driven humanoid and animal characters. His work draws heavily on classic storybook illustration, grotesque caricature, and allegorical theatre, presenting complex social critiques through playful visual fables.
Waterford Walls Connection: ADOR joined the 2017 festival lineup, contributing his trademark whimsical characters. In addition to smaller solo interventions (such as his distinctive figures near New Street Gardens), he co-created the impromptu Book Centre collaboration with SHUK on Little Patrick Street during the stormy August 2017 edition.
SHUK
Style & Background: SHUK is an Irish street artist and illustrator whose visual language merges fine-line drawing, expressive portraiture, and textured figurative painting. His work frequently pairs realistic human anatomy and emotive expressions with organic, decaying, or nature-inspired motifs.
Waterford Walls Connection: A regular contributor to early iterations of Waterford Walls, SHUK left an indelible mark on the 2017 festival trail with two closely situated works: his solo piece at 16 Little Patrick Street (which became the backdrop for Finders Keepers) and his complementary contribution to the split-facade collaboration beside The Book Centre.
Maker & Land
Style & Background: Formed by Irish architect Andrew Land and designer Aaron Maker, this creative partnership specialises in bold, site-specific public art, environmental graphics, and geometric muralism. Their work sits at the intersection of architecture, spatial design, and urban place-making.
Waterford Walls Connection: Commissioned for the August 2021 edition of Waterford Walls, Maker & Land were assigned the high-profile Book Centre facade. Their large-scale graphic piece served as the sanctioned replacement for the weathered 2017 ADOR and SHUK collaboration, providing a structured, contemporary architectural aesthetic that remains on the wall today.
Mr Cenz
Style & Background: Julian Phethean (Mr Cenz) is an internationally acclaimed London graffiti artist active since the late 1980s. His signature aesthetic—often described as "futuristic funk"—fuses classic hip-hop graffiti lettering, abstract colour gradients, and photorealistic female portraits characterised by fluid, translucent brushstrokes and vibrant linework.
Waterford Walls Connection: A headline international artist for the 2026 festival edition, Mr Cenz delivered keynote artist talks and workshops while tackling the prominent exterior of Number 16 Little Patrick Street. His multi-layered portrait painted over the damaged remains of the 2017 SHUK mural, officially resetting the facade.
This post documents the 2017 Book Centre collaboration mural in its original state. The nearby solo mural on the former Finders Keepers building is examined in a separate post, following its overpainting by Mr Cenz in August 2026. The 2017 Book Centre wall was replaced during a subsequent edition of the festival, and that newer piece remains intact.
For over a decade, Waterford has undergone a quiet, colourful transformation. Through the annual Waterford Walls festival, Ireland’s oldest city has systematically turned neglected gable ends, service lanes, and forgotten facades into an evolving open-air gallery. Every August, Irish and international artists arrive to apply fresh layers of paint across the city centre, leaving works that quickly become part of the everyday urban fabric.
Yet street murals are living entities, vulnerable to time, weather, and property redevelopment. Their narratives rarely end when the scaffolding comes down. The intertwined trajectories of two murals created during the August 2017 festival—one on the wall of The Book Centre near the Central Library, and another just around the corner—illustrate the delicate, often brutal ephemerality of public art.
A Tale of Two Flawed Canvases: August 2017
The third edition of Waterford Walls in 2017 contended with relentless summer downpours. Festival documentation and local memory both recall days dominated by torrential rain, which made drying times unpredictable and working on ladders treacherous.
Against this wet backdrop, two distinct pieces took shape on Little Patrick Street:
The Book Centre Collaboration: A joint piece by French street artist ADOR and Irish artist SHUK, painted directly onto the prominent rendered wall of The Book Centre.
The Finders Keepers Solo Wall: A standalone, signed mural by SHUK situated nearby at Number 16.
Each piece carried an inherent vulnerability from the start—one rooted in administrative ambiguity, the other in the commercial volatility of the high street.
The Book Centre Wall: Spontaneity, Weather, and Local Lore
The collaboration between ADOR and SHUK quickly became a local landmark. However, it entered the festival archive without a formal artist signature.
According to festival organisers at the time, the persistent rain simply prevented the artists from completing the final signing before departure. Yet conversations with local residents and business neighbours between 2017 and 2026 suggest a more colourful alternative: that the piece was a spontaneous, late-night collaboration executed without formal festival sign-off, with the severe weather offering convenient cover for its unsigned status.
Whether an approved work cut short by rain or an unsanctioned burst of creative opportunism, the mural survived for years thanks to the goodwill of the building’s owners. It sat comfortably alongside the Central Library quarter, accepted by passers-by as a cornerstone of the 2017 festival trail.
The Contextual Foil: The Finders Keepers Mural
To understand why the Book Centre wall’s eventual replacement mattered, one must look at SHUK’s solo piece on Number 16 Little Patrick Street. Completed and fully signed in August 2017, this mural became inextricably tied to commercial retail when the independent gift shop Finders Keepers opened inside the building three months later, in November 2017.
The shop, founded by Lisa Connolly, became a vibrant fixture of the street, surviving the disruption of pandemic lockdowns. However, the relentless strain of modern independent retail led to its closure in 2024. Compounding the issue, the structure had previously been caught in protracted municipal Compulsory Purchase Order (CPO) deliberations for wider city-centre regeneration.
While the property owner successfully contested the CPO, the building fell into prolonged commercial limbo. When renovation work finally commenced for incoming commercial tenants, practical building requirements took precedence over art preservation: modern window apertures were punched through the exterior masonry, permanently mutilating the painted figure. By August 2026, the scarred remnants were officially erased when London artist Mr Cenz was commissioned to paint an entirely new piece across the facade.
Erasure and Renewal: The Fate of the Library Wall
Unlike the structural destruction of the Finders Keepers wall, the Book Centre collaboration met its end through the natural curatorial cycle of the festival itself. In August 2021, the ADOR and SHUK piece was cleanly overpainted with a new, fully sanctioned festival mural by the creative duo Maker & Land (architect Andrew Land and designer Aaron Maker). That replacement has held the wall ever since.
Discussions with festival staff during subsequent visits shed light on the mechanics behind that transition. Guides were often visibly hesitant to delve into the history of the 2017 collaboration, preferring to direct attention to the compromised Finders Keepers wall down the lane (now no longer an option). When pressed on how replacement walls are selected, staff acknowledged that unsigned works or those lacking clear administrative paper trails from earlier festival editions naturally sit higher on the list for programmatic renewal. Its unofficial reputation, while charming in folklore, made it an uncomplicated surface to reallocate when Maker & Land arrived for the 2021 festival programme.
The Transience of Public Art
The divergent fates of both 2017 pieces underscore the two distinct ways street art vanishes from the urban landscape:
Commercial and physical intervention: Where retail turnover and architectural alterations disfigure a wall without regard for the artwork.
Curatorial turnover: Where the festival ecosystem itself consumes older pieces to make space for incoming artists.
The architectural and stylistic separation across the wall indicates two distinct, adjoining works:
Left Section (Blue Palette): Features an ice-blue, stylised female portrait rendered in a smooth, high-contrast airbrush/spray finish, extending across the left wall face with dripping vertical cyan wash textures and a floating feather motif.
Right Section (Monochrome & Earth Tones): Rendered in a charcoal-grey, woodcut/sketch aesthetic with fine line work, featuring a giant hand grasping autumn leaves and a second female portrait framed by brown and copper leaf fragments.
Physical & Visual Boundary: The vertical dividing line falls directly in the middle of the lower recess (just right of the centre doorway), where the light cyan wash abruptly meets the dark grey, vertical-grain background.
The piece is a split, dual-artist collaboration with each artist commanding their own distinct palette, technique, and half of the facade.
ADOR
Style & Background: A prolific French illustrator and street artist based in Nantes, ADOR is known for his satirical, narrative-driven humanoid and animal characters. His work draws heavily on classic storybook illustration, grotesque caricature, and allegorical theatre, presenting complex social critiques through playful visual fables.
Waterford Walls Connection: ADOR joined the 2017 festival lineup, contributing his trademark whimsical characters. In addition to smaller solo interventions (such as his distinctive figures near New Street Gardens), he co-created the impromptu Book Centre collaboration with SHUK on Little Patrick Street during the stormy August 2017 edition.
SHUK
Style & Background: SHUK is an Irish street artist and illustrator whose visual language merges fine-line drawing, expressive portraiture, and textured figurative painting. His work frequently pairs realistic human anatomy and emotive expressions with organic, decaying, or nature-inspired motifs.
Waterford Walls Connection: A regular contributor to early iterations of Waterford Walls, SHUK left an indelible mark on the 2017 festival trail with two closely situated works: his solo piece at 16 Little Patrick Street (which became the backdrop for Finders Keepers) and his complementary contribution to the split-facade collaboration beside The Book Centre.
Maker & Land
Style & Background: Formed by Irish architect Andrew Land and designer Aaron Maker, this creative partnership specialises in bold, site-specific public art, environmental graphics, and geometric muralism. Their work sits at the intersection of architecture, spatial design, and urban place-making.
Waterford Walls Connection: Commissioned for the August 2021 edition of Waterford Walls, Maker & Land were assigned the high-profile Book Centre facade. Their large-scale graphic piece served as the sanctioned replacement for the weathered 2017 ADOR and SHUK collaboration, providing a structured, contemporary architectural aesthetic that remains on the wall today.
Mr Cenz
Style & Background: Julian Phethean (Mr Cenz) is an internationally acclaimed London graffiti artist active since the late 1980s. His signature aesthetic—often described as "futuristic funk"—fuses classic hip-hop graffiti lettering, abstract colour gradients, and photorealistic female portraits characterised by fluid, translucent brushstrokes and vibrant linework.
Waterford Walls Connection: A headline international artist for the 2026 festival edition, Mr Cenz delivered keynote artist talks and workshops while tackling the prominent exterior of Number 16 Little Patrick Street. His multi-layered portrait painted over the damaged remains of the 2017 SHUK mural, officially resetting the facade.
UNSIGNED MURAL 2017