A vibrant new mural has appeared on the side of the Pemberton Valley Dyking District (PVDD) building—a striking burst of colour and intricacy from French-born artist Mélisse Carron, who gifted the artwork to the village as her first-ever mural project.
Carron, who moved to Pemberton roughly a year ago, approached the Pemberton Arts Council (PAC) in early spring with the idea of painting a mural somewhere in town.
“I was just wondering if they didn’t have a forgotten wall in Pemberton that we can refresh,” Carron explained in an interview with Pique. “It was my very first mural."
PAC executive director Cléa Thomas found an empty wall on the PVDD building, and Carron pitched a design. The Arts Council quickly approved it with no modifications. Pemberton Valley Painting contributed some leftover paint, which shaped the colour palette.
Carron is known for her fine-detail pointillism, a technique that involves painting an image using small dots of colour.
“I’m using pointillism because you can have this nice, interesting gradient that you can see from far away, and then when you get closer, you can see the dots. You can see all those little details,” she said. “I love to work with technique and tricky details.”
Historically, Carron has stuck to black-and-white penwork. That expertise, combined with new techniques using a ladder, brushes and colours, put the mural out of her comfort zone.
“It was only my first try for the brush and the colours with the bigger size,” she said. “But that was actually my goal—I didn’t want money. I just gifted it to the village to see what I can improve.”
From concept to completion, the project moved quickly. Carron developed the draft in just two hours, based on themes she had explored in smaller canvas works. The final mural—rendered in soft gradients of earth tones—took 57 hours to complete.
Though she typically works in miniature, Carron said she was drawn to the physicality and social nature of mural painting.
“Being an artist, you’re always in your workshop,” she said. “Painting outside, I really like it. You connect with people while you’re working. I liked getting to meet a lot of local people.”
The mural itself doesn’t have a name—“It speaks for itself,” she said—but it’s rich in symbolism. At its centre is a pale moon, surrounded by fine, organic tracery reminiscent of termite tracks through wood. The moon and its phases hang over a picturesque vista.
“It’s inspired by the landscape of British Columbia,” Carron explains. “Not a specific place, but the trees, lakes and shapes of nature here.”
Carron said she hopes onlookers are inspired to “take time to be bored and to dream, contemplating all [that] is around you.” She said she’s gotten plenty of positive feedback since the mural went up at the end of May.
She’s currently in Europe preparing for her next project—a smaller mural, but painted while suspended beneath a bungee bridge in Switzerland.
“I don’t want to stop anymore,” Carron said. “I just want to do bigger and more complex stuff.”
She’s also already dreaming up her next project in Pemberton.
“I’m going to work on a new idea during my summer in Europe,” she said, adding she hopes to explore video projection in future work.
A timelapse video of Carron’s work on the mural, filmed and edited by cinematographer Kadri Koop, is available online.
You can check out more of Carron’s work on her Facebook page and Instagram account, as well as on her website, melissecarron.com.
