Identity Tapestry
The Identity Tapestry is a collaborative public artwork created with the students and staff of Mount Lawley Senior High School in Perth, Western Australia.
Participants were invited to contribute a single hand drawn symbol representing something meaningful to them at this moment in their lives. Rather than attempting to define an entire person, each symbol captures one chosen fragment of identity: an interest, a value, a memory, a belief, a joke, or simply something worth leaving behind.
Collected together, these individual marks form a visual portrait of a school community. The resulting mural and digital archive preserve thousands of independent decisions, creating a lasting record of Mount Lawley Senior High School in 2026.
Identity Tapestry
Every day we leave traces of ourselves.
Some are temporary: a conversation, a footprint, a message, a memory. Others remain long after we have moved on.
The Identity Tapestry began with a simple invitation. Students and staff members at Mount Lawley Senior High School were invited to contribute a single drawing representing something meaningful to them at this moment in their lives.
No symbol is intended to define an entire person. Instead, each represents one chosen fragment of identity: an interest, a value, a belief, a memory, a hope, a joke, or simply something that felt important enough to draw.
Individually these marks are modest. Together they become something far greater.
The resulting mural is not a collection of drawings, but a portrait of a community. It captures thousands of independent decisions made by individuals who share the same place while living entirely different lives.
Many of these symbols will lose their meaning over time. Favourite games will be forgotten. Internet memes will disappear. Personal interests will change. Yet together they form an authentic record of what mattered to this community in 2026.
The Identity Tapestry is therefore both artwork and archive. It preserves a moment that can never be repeated.
Reading the Collection
Although every submission is unique, patterns naturally emerge.
Recurring themes reveal shared interests, cultural influences, personal values and visual habits. Hearts, flowers, sporting equipment, celestial objects, animals, religious symbols, internet culture, typography and abstract geometry appear repeatedly throughout the collection.
These repetitions do not diminish individuality. Instead they reveal something equally important: identity is both deeply personal and profoundly shared.
The project invites viewers to move between these two scales. From a distance, the symbols merge into a single surface. Up close, each becomes the mark of one individual who chose to leave a trace.
Mural Generator
Experiment with randomized layout arrangements. Adjust controls to set drawing counts, spacing (padding), global scaling, and rotation. Export the generated collage layout directly to a high-resolution vector SVG.
Sightseeing
Explore the installation residency progress and location of the Identity Tapestry project.
