A Story Between Two Lakes: A 2026 BLAST Mural at St Brigid’s NS Drumcong, County Leitrim
From February to April this year, I worked with Finola McGowan and her Fourth Class at St Brigid’s National School in Drumcong, County Leitrim, through the BLAST Arts in Education Residency programme. (Bringing Live Arts to Students and Teachers)
Over eight sessions, Finola’s class of 22 pupils worked with me to develop A Story Between Two Lakes, a collaborative mural exploring the identity of their school and the landscape surrounding it.
We began in the classroom.
I began by introducing the class to my own practice as a muralist and street artist, sharing examples of my work and talking about how a mural develops from an initial idea into something that can exist across an entire wall. I wanted the pupils to experience some of that process themselves, not only painting the finished piece, but seeing what an artist actually does along the way: looking, drawing, experimenting, making decisions, changing things and finding solutions when something doesn't quite work.
Through conversations, mind maps, quick drawings and gathered references, we explored ideas around place, identity and the school environment.
We also explored different walls around the school that might work for the mural. Like many Irish schools, a lot of the exterior walls were pebbledash, while others were earmarked for future building work, so finding the right surface became part of the process too.
There were lots of ideas.
Rather than beginning with a predetermined design, we gradually worked towards one together. At the end of our drawing sessions, we laid the pupils’ work out across the tables and looked at it as a group. We talked about the ideas and images that stood out, what they liked in one another’s drawings and what might become part of something much larger.
These informal critiques became an important part of the process. The children weren’t only making their own drawings; they were learning to look at one another’s work, talk about it and recognise when an idea had potential.
Finding the story
As we began thinking more specifically about composition, one idea emerged as the central thread: the school sits between two lakes, Lough Scur and Carrickaport Lough.
From there, the mural began to find its story.
The open book on the school crest became our central motif. On the crest, the book opens to reveal a St Brigid’s cross. In our mural, we imagined it instead as a giant pop-up book, with the school itself rising from its pages.
Around it, the landscape stretches across the length of the wall, water, rolling hills, wildflowers, birds and some of the animals that share this part of Leitrim with us.
The book gave us a way of bringing everything together: the school, its pupils and the landscape it belongs to.
One of the challenges was the school building itself. It has a long front façade with lots of windows, and we wanted the image to directly reference the real building. Its shape ended up stretching almost perfectly across the two open pages of the book.
The composition continued to change as we worked. Pupils developed their drawings, discussed different possibilities and voted on key elements they wanted to see included. My role was then to bring all of those individual contributions together into one composition that retained their ideas while also working across the scale and shape of the wall.
From paper to paint
Alongside developing the design, I introduced the class to some of the techniques I use in my own mural practice.
We experimented with stencil work, water-based spray paint and acrylic details, taking drawings through the process of becoming repeatable painted forms. We stencilled silhouettes of footballers and fairies, then practised painting in the details, learning how a simple stencil could become much more individual through layers of colour and hand-painted marks.
One idea I kept returning to during these sessions was that nothing is necessarily fixed. Paint can be layered. Shapes can change. Something that doesn’t work the first time can be painted over, adjusted and tried again.
That freedom to experiment became an important part of the process.
Eventually, it was time to leave the classroom and tackle the wall itself.
We began by priming the long grey surface together in a sky blue that would work for the later of the lake as well as the sky, with everyone taking turns with the rollers. Then the landscape started to appear.
I drew simple outlines directly onto the wall with spray paint and the pupils worked collaboratively in pairs, taking turns filling areas with colour using spray paint. Layers of colour, stencil work and painted detail gradually transformed the wall.
A Story Between Two Lakes
At the centre of the finished mural, the school building rises from the pages of an enormous open book. Children run through the scene and off the edges of the pages, giving the whole image a playful, slightly magical quality.
On either side, the image opens outward into the surrounding landscape. The two lakes stretch towards green hills, while wildflowers run almost continuously along the foot of the wall. Local wildlife appears amongst them, a rabbit, badger and fox, with birds moving through the sky above.
The wall itself presented another challenge. It had some existing water damage which left pale, weeping marks across parts of the surface. Rather than pretending it wasn't there, I tried to work with it. I positioned the watery areas of the mural so that if those white marks reappear over time, they will fall predominantly across the lake rather than interrupting the painted landscape.
What had started as a collection of conversations and drawings in the classroom had become a large-scale artwork in the schoolyard.
One of the loveliest things I recorded at the end of the residency was the pupils’ excitement in recognising their own contributions. They were keen to point out the elements they had helped create and there was a very clear sense of “we made this.”
That feels important to me with these kinds of collaborative mural projects.
The finished artwork remains on the wall, but the mural is also the result of everything that happened before it: looking, drawing, talking, experimenting, changing our minds, making decisions together and eventually seeing those small ideas become something much bigger.
A Story Between Two Lakes now sits exactly where its story began, at St Brigid’s, within the landscape that inspired it.
