LYNN — On the side of a vacant, yellow building located at 80 Almont St., there are two gigantic murals of animals that have continued to captivate residents in Lynn.
The artwork is part of a series titled “Big Trash Animals,” created by renowned artist Artur Bordalo, known as Bordalo II, using almost entirely collected materials, including garbage and reused plastic. His work is centered around the relationship between consumerism and the impact it has on the environment, specifically regarding species that are either endangered or have gone extinct. Bordalo has created over 195 animals for the series, which has been featured in 24 countries and four continents, including in Portugal, Italy, Sweden, and Thailand.
In Lynn, Beyond Walls, a creative nonprofit headquartered in the city that reimagines public spaces through vibrant and captivating artwork to strengthen communities, worked with Bordalo to create both pieces, one of a wolverine and the other of a bear.
According to founder and CEO Alfred Wilson, it took Beyond Walls around six to eight weeks to collect plastic trash around the city for the installation, which went up officially in 2019.
“Most of this plastic that we think is being recycled isn’t,” said Wilson. “It goes into landfills, or it gets incinerated, it becomes microplastic and gets into our food sources and into us. That’s the narrative with [Bordalo’s work] is that our use of plastics and the environmental and health consequences of that are something that he tries to share that story through his artwork.”
To Wilson’s own surprise, the building is still there, despite it being deemed a safety hazard by the Lynn Fire Department that same year. As a result, Bordalo’s artwork has remained a fixture in the city for now seven years, which is a lot longer than even he anticipated.
“To be honest, when we installed that piece in 2019, we didn’t know whether it would even stay up for a year,” Wilson said.
He added, “The Fire Department had [deemed] that building wouldn’t hold the weight of water if you were putting out a fire on it, so that’s some of the signage that’s on that building — but the building has stayed there.”
Just a few years later, Beyond Walls continued to work with Bordalo to install his largest art piece in the world of a five-story moose and baby moose, which is currently located in Holyoke, Massachusetts.
“It’s pretty cool that we had two pieces installed in Lynn and we’ve since worked with him in some of the other former industrial cities,” Wilson said.
