Jellyfish Mural

I designed and painted this mural for a group of 23 children with severe autism in a local primary school. The room in which it is painted is used to deliver sensory interventions that are integral to the children’s learning and development. Upon designing the mural, I had to take into account the many ways in which staff use the space throughout the week, the lighting within the room – which has no natural light source – as well as the atmosphere that the mural would undoubtedly generate upon its completion.

The sensory room (known within the primary school as ‘The Pod’) is designed to be a space wherein children with sensory impairments and tactile defensiveness can experience calming visual and tactile stimulation. Each piece of equipment in the room either illuminates, vibrates, moves, glows, or has some combination of the aforementioned traits. The children often sit or stand in front of the room’s bubble tube for instance, fascinated and entranced by the calming ways the bubbles float, pop, disappear, and then are regenerated within it. Equally, they are captivated by the way object’s glow beneath the room’s blacklight, or the way in which their surroundings are visually altered when they change the colours on the room’s interactive LED strip.

Initial mural design: a digital vector illustration created using Affinity Designer

Digital mockup: a digital trial to gauge how the completed mural could look in the POD when the LED strip lights have been activated, created in Affinity Designer

I sought to create an artwork which combined some of the most visually engaging elements of The POD, while simultaneously providing the children a sense of tactile satisfaction when they touched it. Taking inspiration from many of the room’s blue elements, and the motion of the liquid in the bubble tube, I created a deep sea jellyfish mural which would react to both the UV blacklight and the LED lights in the room. UV paint was used to mimic the appearance of ‘bioluminescence’ in the heads and foremost tentacles of each jellyfish, and gives off a satisfying glow under the dim blue wash of the artificial lights in the room. The remainder of the mural was painted using matte emulsion, which I chose to layer quite thickly onto the wall. Not only did this allow for the illusion of dimension – particularly when making it look as though one translucent tentacle was overlaying another – it also created physical peaks and trophs on the surface of the work that the children were keen to run their fingers over and feel.

I am deeply satisfied both with the way in which the mural came together, and the way in which it has augmented the children’s learning.