'We just wanted Moncton to be a cooler place to live': Mural festival kicks off

The Festival Inspire will reveal about a dozen murals around Moncton Friday worked on by artists all week. Inspired by local Acadian slang and political activism, artists from across the world and across Canada were brought together to make Moncton a cooler city to live in.

Lisa Griffin is the co-founder and the organizer of the festival and she says that after travelling the world, she hoped that she could make her hometown a more interesting city for people like her to live in.

"We just wanted Moncton to be a cooler place to live and to be more aesthetically interesting to look at and have inspiring spaces and be able to stay here ourselves as travellers who have been away for a long time," Griffin said.

International interest

The festival is in its fourth year and it's already catching the interest of both local and international artists. Artists Conzo and Throb have come here all the way from Glasgow, Scotland. It's their first time doing the festival and both their murals already have the town buzzing.

A drive down Champlain road in Dieppe will have you cross paths with an ad by the side of the road for Syrup of the Sea. The piece is of an old time bottle of honey shaped like a bear squirting syrup. The banner says it's a product of Dieppe and the artists are hoping people might think it's real.

Conzo and Throb said their work is satirical and that they hope to confuse people more than anything else.

"When we paint we like to use a bit of the local culture in the piece that we're painting and we like to create these fake products so hopefully we confuse a lot of people. I think there will be a lot of chat in the next couple of weeks about whether or not this thing actually exists because we really try our best to make it as convincing as we can," Ciaran Globel said.

Down the street from him, local artist Chelsea Gauvin is working away on her mural at the Starving Artist Cafe. She says that the message behind it is about the disconnect that we have from the food we eat.

The mural, once completed, will have fruits hanging from a string that is dangling from nowhere essentially.

"My overall concept is talking about the food that we eat, we don't always know where it comes from," Gauvin said.

The murals will be completed over the next day and will be available for people to see permanently around town.