Peterborough underpass mural represents Covid pandemic experience

A street artist has turned young people's experiences of the Covid pandemic into a 15ft-high (4.5m) image.

Nathan Murdoch was sent ideas and drawings from those who attended Peterborough's Young People's Counselling Service (YPCS) in Cambridgeshire.

His image of a divided face representing positive and negative is on an underpass at Nene Park.

It depicts "an upside-down world" before and during Covid, he said.

The YPCS charity provides a free counselling service for those between 11 and 18 years old who are in emotional difficulty.

It worked with Murdoch from Street Arts Hire for the art project commissioned by Peterborough City Council to explore the impact the pandemic has had on young people and their mental health.

Murdoch, who is from the city, said the charity visited schools in Peterborough and asked young people about the emotions and experiences they went through while in isolation.

They sent him a number of their ideas and drawings from which he developed the concept for his painting.

"There was one that was a face divided into two halves like a positive and a negative," he said.

"It gave me the concept of like an upside-down world, a world before Covid and a world during Covid and that's what the painting depicts."

He added that with all the imagery and words he was sent "there was always both sides of a story".

"It was like what they were going through but [also] where they want to be... it was sort of remembering a good time and getting back to a good time," he said.

Murdoch said that the idea of doing a mural was so that "people can access them, can come and see them, connect with them".

"I think art can provoke a lot of emotion in people, particularly positive emotion," he said.

"I like to create art that can make people feel good, particularly after an experience like the pandemic... a piece of art can change someone's day."

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