Fintan Magee, who this week painted a 10m high portrait of a local Bundjalung elder and her grandson on the Lismore City Library, is an internationally recognised mural artist who was been commissioned to paint buildings everywhere from Jordan to Norway and El Paso, Texas. In an artist's talk on Wednesday at the Lismore Regional Gallery he used a series of images to talk about his influences, his work and the story of Lismore's newest large-scale mural.

My father was born in a small town called Derry in Northern Ireland. This is the first, probably the first bit of graffiti I interacted with or saw when I was very small. This is, I don't know if you could call it a mural, but it's one of the signs that basically mark the neighborhoods in Northern Ireland in Derry.

The neighborhood is called Bogside and this is what it looked like when I first visited in the early '90s when I was probably about five years old. At the time, it was an area of civil conflict. Everyone probably knows the history of Northern Ireland, so I won't go too deeply into it.

That's my father at 16.

That's my mom. My father moved from Northern Ireland when he was 17 to the UK and my parents met at art school. So I grew up in a very creative family. They moved to Australia and had me.

This is me in Lismore in 1985. When my parents moved from the UK to Australia, they bought a church for about $8,000 - Baby Boomers right. I just wanted to show some embarrassing baby photos basically.

Here's some of my early work. Pretty sure this was Michelangelo because he's got nunchucks.

That's me on my first trip back to Derry, in Ireland, which is when I had my my first interactions with mural art and public art at five years old in 1990. There was very little graffiti or and no murals in Brisbane where we were living at the time, so it was the first time I'd ever kind of interacted with mural work.

As you can see, the neighborhood, from 1975 to about 1995 became filled with murals and the murals became a big part of the landscape during the conflict.

A lot of the murals, were used to mark territory. Certain paramilitary groups let people know where they were not allowed to go.

Some of the murals were about the civil rights movement and the civil rights movement in Northern Ireland in particular.

Some were memorials to paramilitary members that had been killed.

Some dealt with other kinds of political issues.

So I first saw the murals when I was five. I went back when I was 10 and then again when I was 12 and I would go out and photograph the work and just developed a fascination with mural arts from a young age. I was particularly interested in the idea of the public wall as a kind of a community message board, a way for people to communicate ideas outside of the media or the mainstream channels. From a young age, I was kind of obsessed with the power of that.

I came back to Brisbane at 13 years old and kind of got absorbed in Brisbane's graffiti scene, this is probably 1998 by the time I started writing graffiti. At that time we couldn't really get commissioned to paint walls so we would just go out at night and kind of make do with what we could.

This is a on a train in Brisbane in 2011, so I was a little bit older by the time I got around to this one.

This is another wall in an abandoned building that I painted in sometime in the 2000s, maybe 2006.

So at this time I became very absorbed in traditional graffiti and letter forms. I always had a fascination with art, but I guess I didn't really have the money or the resources to create murals yet, so this was kind of the best I could do with what I had.

I was probably in my early twenties when I painted this, and it was kind of a jump. Around this time I had enrolled in art school in Brisbane at the Queensland College of Art and that basically ruined my graffiti, to put it simply. I went from doing these letter forms and decided I wanted to experiment more. I kind of got bored with the traditional letter structure and also I started doing oil paintings at art school. I wanted to see if I could combine my oil paintings with my graffiti, still painting in abandoned buildings without permission or funding. 

I don't know what I was thinking with this one. I think there was this kind of perception that graffiti was rubbish, so I thought it would be hilarious if I just painted rubbish on the wall. We've all got to start somewhere. It was a bit more difficult because the good thing about graffiti is you can always just start with your first letter. Once I kind of started to change out of that structure it was all very confusing. So there was a period of experimentation.

So this is a little more fun. This is on an abandoned train line, in Byron Bay actually. It's the old train that used to run through Lismore. There is a massive section, it's probably 20 kilometers of abandoned track and we used to go down there during the day because there was no one there to really disturb you so you could paint all day.

This is a work I painted in Melbourne in 2011. So this is when I started to develop a little more and branch out into more figurative works and started to find my voice a little bit more. This actually was also done illegally. It was painted on paper and then stuck to the wall using glue. So it only lasted about two weeks before people tore it down, but at that stage we couldn't really get permission to paint anything yet, so we were still very DIY. 

This is another work in an abandoned building in Sydney, which is more of an installation. It was at the beginning of the Syria crisis and it was a newspaper clipping I found of refugee kids collecting water or lining up to get water at one of the camps. 

I painted the wall and then installed two mirrors on either side of the wall so that when you walk into the space, the image reflects it. 

It kind of becomes like an infinite painting. It was was kind of my comment on the scale of the crisis, I guess.

This is probably the next period of my work. Basically what was happening with these works that we were doing in abandoned buildings, was me and Guido van and a couple other Brisbane artists at the time, we were doing these works with very little budget and very little resources, but we were putting them online and started to kind of get recognition through a number of the street art blogs and through our social media presence. The Internet really gave us an opportunity because in Brisbane there wasn't much of a street art scene happening at this stage - this is 2011, 2012. Because we were putting our work online, we started to get recognition from curators overseas and I started to get booked to paint walls legally. Which was nice because then I finally had a little bit of money. 

So this is a work I did for a street art festival in Puerto Rico in 2016, about three years after that last work with the mirrors. This one was a kind of a comment on climate change. Puerto Rico's a small island in the Caribbean and those islands are very susceptible to climate change, because they're so low lying. A lot of their land mass is going to go underwater potentially in the next 50 years. I painted the silo structure as a glass of water, which is kind of symbolic of an island having limited space and you can see the small boy is carrying an iceberg and it's slowly melting and his little island world is filling up with water. So it's somewhat whimsical, but I guess there was a serious concept behind it. 

This is another work I painted in Portugal in 2016. As I developed more and more and got booked for more gigs, the work started to get bigger and bigger.

This is a work up in Kiev, in Ukraine in 2015. A lot of my work's kind of dealt with the 2011 Brisbane floods and climate change at this part of my career. My mother's home went under in 2011 in the Brisbane floods, so I kind of got obsessed with using some of those issues to talk about climate change and stuff like that.

This is a work I painted in the south of Italy and was kind of my little homage to the mothers in the neighborhood. A lot of women around there grow aloe vera and that was a nice piece for me personally because my mom used to grow aloe vera and give me aloe vera when I was injured or cut.

This is a work I did in El Paso in Texas, which is right on the border of Mexico. You can actually see there's that kind of line in the background - that's the border wall. I painted an image of a local woman who actually lives across the border in Juarez, which is the Mexican town, and she crosses over for work every day, and I painted the mountains upside down in the painting. That was just kind of about living between two worlds and her story of carving out a life for herself in that part of the world.

This is a work I painted in Amman which is the capital city of Jordan. The girl is a Syrian refugee but the neighborhood the painting was in was actually a predominantly Palestinian neighborhood. It was an incredibly interesting neighborhood to work in because it started out as a refugee camp for Palestinians who had been forced out of Israel and basically I think in the '60s it became pretty evident that they weren't going to be able to go back. By that stage they had been there for about 20 years. So the Jordanian government actually build public housing for them and settled them permanently. So it's very much a neighborhood that has a story of migration and a strong refugee background. 

To be able to paint a Syrian there was pretty special and everyone was really amazing. So that was a great project.

This is a project I did in Stavanger, in Norway, for a new art festival. I painted on two silos. When I arrived in Norway in 2016 there had been massive job cuts because there was a drop in oil prices and it wasn't profitable to extract the oil anymore. Norway is a major oil exporter and a lot of the operations were shutting down and a lot of workers were being laid off. Stavanger is kind of the home of the oil industry, so there was a lot of change and it was kind of a weird vibe when I got there, a lot of businesses closing down and stuff like that.

So I painted a friend of mine who had been working on the rigs and you can see how it's kind of painted like a Rorschach effect. So he's kind of like breaking up and disappearing. For me the work was kind of about, not just about Stavanger, but about working class anxiety in general, and in particular in the era of Donald Trump. I think this was during the Donald Trump campaign, so he hadn't been elected yet, but everyone was kind of freaking out a little bit about that.

Ironically, considering this was kind of about the disappearance of the working class, they pulled the structure down and built apartment blocks there later. So it became kind of a double metaphor for gentrification in the end. This is an image of the building being pulled down literally two years later. It was kind of sad to see it come down but also kind of gave the work extra meaning for me. That's part of the game when you make work on the street. Everything is very ephemeral and things come and go. 

This another work I painted in Finland, in Helsinki, about fatherhood.

This one is of workers in Istanbul, in Turkey. It's kind of comment on the drought in Istanbul. 

We had a really bad drought in Queensland, before the floods, and 2010 was kind of the peak of it. The water restrictions were so bad that everyone was showering with buckets then using the extra water to water their gardens. That was a crazy time. I think the dam levels were about 10 per cent. 

So when I got to Istanbul in 2017, there were water restrictions there and people were doing the same thing. I thought that was kind of interesting so I painted a bunch of local guys kind of holding the buckets and the piece is called Pray for Rain and it's about the sacrifices we're all making in the era of climate change.

This is another work I did in France, near Paris.

This one's in Belarus.

This is a work I painted in Goa, in India. This is my last work actually, in December last year. I was over there for a big mural festival that was happening, called Start India. This is kind of a kind of a social realist piece. I painted four guys who were local workers that were helping out with the festival but I wanted to paint a Roman column, they they're bracing or holding up. For me. the column kind of symbolized opulence and wealth and those men are the unseen workers holding everything up underneath. It's kind of a throwback to Diego Rivera and those old masters that were doing social realism and portrayals of the working class.

This work has a pretty similar theme. This was a recent collaboration I did with another artist, Guido van Helten, who also has some work in Lismore in the Back Alley Gallery. This was a similar thing. Guido's very journalistic in his approach, and he's also interested in telling stories of everyday working class people. I guess there's like a tradition in public art to honour the grandiose, whether that's a king or a great poet or a big sculpture of an explorer or something like that. What me and Guido are interested in is subverting that tradition a little bit and just kind of painting the everyday. 

That was particularly important in Iran because Iran has a massive mural scene but there's a huge amount of murals of the Ayatollah Khomeini. The murals there are quite propagandistic. So for us it was more about just showing the everyday worker. And this was based on photos we took in the grand bizarre in the center of Tehran. It's just two guys repairing carpets. 

With the economic restrictions and sanctions that are on Iran, they can't import goods in the same way that we can in the Western world. So you see this big emphasis on repair and reuse and recycling actually. These guys would just literally sit there and spend hours and hours of the day just rethreading old carpet and repairing them and reselling them. It quite a beautiful process to watch.

I arrived in Lismore about 10 days ago but this project's been in the works for probably six months now. After Lismore Quad placemaking officer Marisa Snow originally reached out to me, I asked her if she knew anyone that would make an interesting subject or an angle for the mural. She introduced me to Auntie Irene Harrington who's one of the Bundjalung elders. She's a fascinating woman. She studied here when these buildings over here were still a school. She was the second indigenous child to be allowed to study there.

I thought she would be a fascinating subject for the mural. She's also been very much involved language preservation and was involved in the passing of the NSW indigenous languages bill. We actually sat down with her on the first day that I got here, to consult with her about our ideas for the mural and I told her I wanted to paint her portrait on the wall and she just shot me down straight away. She was like, "no way am I going up on that wall. You don't want my face up there. Nobody wants my face up there". So yeah, that threw a spanner in the works pretty early in the game. 

Luckily she was there with her grandson Sheldon and I pitched her the idea of representing her in the mural as more of an abstract shape or a silhouette and to paint her grandson instead, and she agreed and that worked really nicely. 

She's obviously worked very hard to preserve the Bundjalung language, and her grandson now speaks the language pretty much fluently and is involved in building an app and a bunch of other preservation projects. So the fact that she's passed the language onto her grandkids, for me it was very beautiful. I thought actually having her grandson in the mural was actually nicer in a way and it gave extra meaning. 

That's Sheldon again. This was the next day. His shirt was was a bit weird, so I decided to reshoot it. There was was just a bit too much going on there. 

So I was able to kind of represent Aunty Irene through text in a series of words in the Bundjalung language that she gave me. Sheldon is holding a message stick which is important at elder's meetings, because you're not allowed to talk unless you're holding the stick and they kind of pass it around. So it's about her passing it to him really and passing the language onto him. And the painting is on the library, which is obviously about transferal of knowledge as well, so I think it all fits quite quite well.