Toilet Murals

"Eating (The Fourth Wall)" - Toilet Mural, UQ Student Union, LC 1994

The Fourth Wall of Eating is the door.
I tell people it's a self portrait but nobody ever agrees with me. It was the first section that I painted and at that stage I really had no idea that i was going to do any more. I covered the existing appallingly bigoted graffiti on the door with a coat of white, and began painting. To get rid of that graffiti was the reason I was there, but at the same time I also saw my replacement painting as just another type of graffito, so I painted silently and secretly in the night just like a real graffiti artist.

As i did more paintings, people started talking about them and wondering who was doing them. We kept it secret for many months until people started to accept the "new graffiti". I heard one man say that his three year old daughter always insisted on be taken into that particular cubicle so that she could look at the cow on the wall.

The original idea of stopping people from writing immature and bigoted graffiti on the toilet walls was a success. They still graffitied the paintings but only in the flat colour areas and now the graffiti used the painting subject matter as a starting point for the graffiti subject matter. For instance, in one of the ribs of the man on the door somebody wrote, "No man has ribs like this", and later in the next rib down somebody wrote, "This man needs Jesus", and a few weeks later in the next rib down somebody wrote, "This man was Jesus".

The graffiti in the women's toilet in those days was usually much more enlightened discussion & ongoing written debates on various topics. It was far more entertaining than the crass bigoted male toilet graffito one-liners.