In places like Dublin with over 1,000 years of history, art has become a way to celebrate shared beliefs, significant events, and a common love towards the city. While most art is restricted in museums, street art, and specifically queer street art, is more accessible to the public. Joe Caslin, a street artist known for his large-scale murals spread around Dublin’s city centre, has advocated for LGBTQ+ rights and marriage equality through his work, as well as against mental health stigma.

The Irishman revealed his new mural ‘Kintsugi’ on April 15, 2024. 

The activist’s newest work, created in collaboration with Dublin Samaritans charity, is featured in Dublin’s city centre on Montague Lane. The mural, covering the side of a house, raises funds for the charity, which helps people in psychological distress. As reported by RTÉ, according to the director of the Samaritans, there is a call to the helpline every 61 seconds, and volunteers respond to over 1,000 calls per day. 

The piece incorporates the Japanese style of Kintsugi, in which cracks are painted over in gold to turn damage, fracture, and imperfection into beauty. The subject of the piece symbolises how a person can at one time be broken by parts of their identity such as mental health issues, relationships, or sexuality. Despite their struggles, they mend themselves back together in their healing process and attach the broken pieces to become even more beautiful than before. 

 

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On April 10, 2015, Caslin unveiled ‘The Claddagh Embrace’ on Dame Street in Dublin. A month later, he installed a mural of two women on the side of a castle in the west of Ireland, inspired by Frederic William Curton’s painting ‘The Meeting on the Turret Stairs’.

The pieces came ahead of the Irish referendum on marriage equality in which 62% of voters said Yes, legalising same-sex weddings. The mural was inspired by a photograph of two men Barry and James, captured by the Irish photographer Sean Jackson. The political impact of this piece of queer street art during a period of mass societal change became a symbol of marriage equality and LGBTQ+ rights. 

The following year in 2016, Caslin installed a five-storey mural of a married lesbian couple in Belfast to campaign for same-sex marriage in Northern Ireland.

 

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Street artist Joe Caslin makes his work freely accessible to the public, also encouraging them to engage in conversations surrounding pressing issues in Irish society. Many other queer street artists have done the same in Ireland and beyond, using art for activism to represent the times in which we live.