Rochester Mural Festival organisers Judy and Peter Anderson with the 2021 winning mural. Photo: File
The Rochester Mural Festival committee has announced the theme and dates for the 10th edition of the event in 2025.
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The festival will run from Saturday, March 29 to Saturday, April 5, 2025, with entries open now until Saturday, November 23, 2024.
The 2025 theme is ‘Life, Love and Music’, inspired by the popular previous theme ‘Paint us a Song’. Organiser Judy Anderson said that choosing the theme was the hardest part of planning the festival.
“That's the hardest thing every year: trying to think of an original theme,” she said.
“We had one two years ago, which was ‘Paint us a Song’ and the artists loved that. We got some really good murals from it.
“We’re looking back. This is our 10th mural festival. We’re looking around the previous themes that we’ve had... we draw on the community to give us their ideas.
“A lot of people were keen on doing a music theme again, but we wanted it a bit broader.”
Previous artists have hailed from Canada, New Zealand, Queensland and Tasmania. Many locals also enter, with Echuca artist Maryann Jenkins taking out the People’s Choice Award in 2024.
Maryann Jenkins with her People’s Choice Award-winning mural at the 2024 Rochester Mural Festival. Photo: File
The ‘Rochybald’ prize is also available for local artists to enter. This is a smaller canvas available to purchase from Dingwall’s Newsagency, with a $1000 prize pool on offer.
“I take them out to all the schools, and they compete,” Mrs Anderson said.
“Adults can enter too, we have all age groups.”
The Rochester Mural Festival committee has been delivering the annual event for more than a decade and is now ready to pass the baton to the next group.
“We’re all getting a bit old,” Mrs Anderson said.
“When they put these other ones up there will be 80 murals up around Rochester, so we’re running out of sites to put them.
“We reckon we’ll call it a day, unless anybody else would like to take it on.”
Four previous murals will be taken out of storage and installed at the new shelters in the southern end of the mural park.
Applications must include an entry form, CV, photo of a painted miniature mural, artist statement, photo of the artist, and a code of conduct form. The entry fee is $40.
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