The City of Barrie’s public art coordinator Carol-Ann Ryan unveiled a new mural at the Tiffin Boat Launch on the waterfront of Barrie last week. The piece, which is titled Mother Earth, is a mosaic collaboration between two local artists Angela Aujla and Meg Leslie.

The installation was sponsored by the Rotary Club of Barrie, who has had a hand in beautifying the city’s waterfront sponsoring the installation of multiple pavilions and the South Shore Centre.

Aujla, a daughter of immigrants from India, designed the piece in hopes of helping decolonize the way we think of nature.

“I think about Indigenous artists, like Bill Reid or Norval Morisseau, or many people that came after him, and the art where everything is embedded together. It's not isolated and separated and categorized in that colonial way,” says Aujla.

The woman, loon, fox and minnows flow together as one in this mosaic piece, showing that one is not separate from nature, but interconnected.

Aujla’s collaborator, Meg Leslie, hand-made the mosaic clay pieces that the mural is built from. Continuing the decolonization theme of the piece, Leslie had her students at the local Montessori school create the minnows that we see on the mural. 

Mayor Alex Nuttall was in attendance at the unveiling and shared that the City is working to put in place an Indigenous space in the area. He did not give the exact location but motioned toward the Allandale Train Station when he spoke.

If you’d like to learn more about public art in Barrie, you can visit the City of Barrie’s website barrie.ca.