Toronto in Colour maps the city through its murals, graffiti, and street art. By documenting the words, textures, images, and layered traces found across neighbourhoods, this series examines how people transform walls and overlooked spaces into canvases for expression, storytelling, communication, and resistance. These interactions, whether a quick tag, a fading stencil, or a large-scale mural, form a public archive of the communities that shape the city.

Street art is part of Toronto’s everyday landscape. It appears on the walls we walk past, the buildings we commute beside, and the alleyways we glimpse only in passing. Despite its constant presence, it invites curiosity and critical looking. Who placed this here? Why this wall, this moment, this neighbourhood? What impact does it make? Graffiti and murals challenge traditional assumptions about where art belongs, who is allowed to make it, and who is meant to see it. They can emerge from protest, pride, creativity, or the desire to leave a personal mark within public space. Over time, weathering, repainting, and layering shift these surfaces, reminding us that with the passage of time, you no longer have the same thing. Street art becomes both temporary and cumulative, a record of change written onto the city itself.

Photographs of murals within their full environments show how they interact with surrounding architecture, community life, and urban space. Capturing close details, textures, cracks, sun-fading, and layers of overlapping marks highlights how time transforms these works. Through sequencing, the book considers relationships between different modes of expression: how tags, murals, stickers, stencils, and scratches coexist, interrupt, or respond to one another across the city’s surfaces.