Uprooted

There is a particular kind of quiet that lives inside the word uprooted. It is not violent, though the act itself may be. It is the silence that follows departure, the stillness of a landscape remembered rather than inhabited. This mural began in that silence and grew outward from it, filling the dining room wall of UNA Pizza + Wine in Bridgeland, Calgary with a visual meditation on displacement, belonging, and the slow, persistent work of putting down roots in unfamiliar soil.

The brief was architectural as much as it was artistic. UNA's Bridgeland location is an intimate, linear space: banquette seating runs the length of the room, a long bar faces the open kitchen, and the dominant wall above the diners needed something that could hold its own against the energy of a busy restaurant without overwhelming it. The mural had to function at two scales simultaneously, as a sweeping environmental backdrop during service and as something that rewards closer attention when the room quiets.

The Composition

The central figure is a woman with closed eyes, her face rendered in soft pinks and lavenders, tilted gently as though caught in a moment between sleep and waking. She is not resting. She is remembering. Her features dissolve at the edges into the landscape that surrounds her: dark mountain silhouettes, flowing rivers of cobalt blue, pine forests standing like sentinels, and a sky that shifts between deep night and the pale blush of early morning. The entire composition reads as a single unbroken gesture, figure and terrain inseparable from one another.

The colour palette was chosen with the restaurant environment in mind. Deep blues, midnight blacks, warm pinks, and soft purples create a richness that holds under both the warm amber of evening service lighting and the cool natural light that filters through the front windows during the day. The mural does not compete with the food, the conversation, or the warmth of the room. It absorbs all of it and gives it back as atmosphere.

The flowing forms that move through and around the figure, rivers, wind, the aurora-like bands of colour that sweep across the upper register, are deliberate. They carry the eye across the full span of the wall, creating a sense of movement and continuity that keeps the mural from feeling static. From across the room, the work reads as a bold graphic statement. From the banquette directly beneath it, the layering and the subtlety of the colour transitions become apparent. This dual legibility was essential to the design.

Roots and New Ground

The thematic core of the work is the migrant experience, not as a narrative with a beginning and an end, but as a state of being. The figure does not arrive and she does not leave. She exists within the landscape, growing from it and into it in the same breath. The mountains are both the terrain she carries in memory and the new ground she now inhabits. The rivers flow in both directions. The trees root downward into a soil that could be anywhere, that could be here.

For a neighbourhood like Bridgeland, with its own layered history of immigration and reinvention, this felt right. The mural does not illustrate a specific story. It holds space for all of them, every guest who has ever sat beneath it and carried their own version of that word, uprooted, somewhere behind their ribs.

Designing for a Dining Room

Interior murals in active hospitality spaces present constraints that exterior walls do not. The surface shares the room with people, food, sound, and light that changes by the hour. The work must add to the experience of dining without ever upstaging it. Scale must feel generous but not aggressive. Colour must be rich enough to read from a distance and subtle enough to recede when the room fills.

A Personal Work

Of all the projects in the KINN Studios body of work, Uprooted remains the one closest to the practice. It is the piece that most directly articulates the questions that drive the studio: what does it mean to carry a place inside you while building a life in another. How does cultural identity survive transplantation. Whether the act of making art on a wall, in a neighbourhood, in a city that was not always yours, is itself a kind of rooting.

The mural does not answer these questions. It holds them, quietly, above a room full of people sharing pizza and wine. And that, perhaps, is exactly where they belong. Not in a gallery, separated and preserved behind white walls, but woven into the fabric of an ordinary evening, present the way memory is present, always there, gently insistent, colouring everything.