132 hours of painting, 7 artists, 70+ murals at new Sydney hotel
No simple splash of paint. Sydney’s newest luxury boutique hotel, Aiden Darling Harbour has worked with an award-winning Australian artist to create more than 70 murals and one huge 25-metre-high artwork over almost two weeks, adding colour and local stories to its interior walls.
Everyone who stays at Aiden Darling Harbour receives a complimentary art gallery experience which they can enjoy without leaving the building. In fact, guests can soak up the art without even leaving their bed…
That’s all thanks to the hotel’s artist in residence, Jessica Le Clerc, the creative mind behind the mammoth challenge of turning almost 100 walls into stunning artworks during the construction phase of this new boutique hotel.
Award-winning Australian fine artist, Jess took on the task of creating unique wall murals at the bed heads of the majority of the hotel’s 88 guest rooms, as well as transforming a soaring 25-metre-high internal brick wall into a colourful work of art.
Months of sketching and planning (including painting a 2.5-metre scaled oil on canvas version of the brick wall work) culminated in an 11-day stretch of 12-hour painting sessions by Jess and her tight-knit team of six other revered female artists, working their way from one guest room to the next, and up and down eight storeys of scaffolding to hand-paint the large hidden mural.
“This has been one of the biggest challenges I’ve faced in my career to date, given the scale, logistics and time required to create the lofty mural in particular, working with varying levels of light, scaffolding, hundreds of litres of paint and long days across almost two consecutive weeks,” Jess confesses.
Jess and her team were even rained on during parts of the painting, with the large mural located in a then roof-less lightwell.
“When it comes to my philosophy on art, I see myself as being a problem solver. Overcoming problems is often how my art evolves. And with this creative project, there were lots of limitations to what I could do with the walls (especially working with a heritage building and during construction, so in many ways this project and I were meant to be.”
Wait, what did they paint?
Read all about the hotel’s incredible artworks and the fascinating process behind creating them in the full blog here. Follow Jess’ journey via her Instagram.
Aiden Darling Harbour is a boutique hotel thoughtfully-designed for the traveller of today, fusing convenience and style together across 88 compact rooms with hand painted wall murals, and a combined lobby, bar and café, in a 1930s Art Deco building in Sydney’s harbourside Pyrmont village.
45 Murray Street, Pyrmont, NSW 2009
www.aidendarlingharbour.com.au
IG @aidendarlingharbour
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