A special kind of mural with a message to preserve endangered species in Hawaiʻi is taking center stage this month at Downtown Art Centerʻs new exhibit, "How Nature Restores Me."
Artist Jana Ireijo creates so-called "vanishing murals," using charcoal gathered from areas recently affected by wildfires.
She picked up this art form in 2019 after an Australian bushfire affected nearly 3 billion animals. The following year, the COVID-19 pandemic swept across the globe.
"The Earth was on fire, and we were separated," she said. "Everything shut down, and I kept thinking, 'What am I doing with art?'"
When she saw the news about the bushfires, she learned that koalas were too slow to escape the flames, which deeply affected Ireijo.
She painted a mural of a koala using wildfire charcoal, which was mailed to her by a friend in Australia. Once finished, she left the painting outside until the rain and snow washed the work away.
"It would look like it was crying," she said of her koala painting.
Throughout August, Ireijo is doing live demonstrations on a 6-foot wooden canvas at the Downtown Art Center.
Her subject is the ʻakikiki, or the Hawaiian honeycreeper. This bird species is extinct in the wild, while only a handful live in conservation.
Ireijo said she's using wildfire charcoal from Maui's 2023 fire. She found charcoal near Olinda Road, across the street from the Maui Bird Conservation Center.
She's also gathering other materials near the burned areas to create colors for her piece, including the ʻākala raspberry, maile seed, hāpuʻu fern, ʻamaʻu fern, ʻōlapa, alaea clay and Maui soil.
She said the pigments are an essential part of the mural.
"They're symbolic, and the pigments represent the area the species are from," she said.
On the last day of the exhibit, Ireijo said she would wash the mural away with water from the Nuʻuanu stream.
"I wash it away on the last day to show impermanence, a sense of urgency, but also what you know coming together to protect what we love," she said.
