Auckland street artist 'at war' with taggers who keep vandalising his work
An Auckland street artist says he is “at war” with taggers who keep vandalising his work.
Jesse Jensen, who paints under the name Ares Artifex, has painted murals across Auckland, including for Auckland Council, the Department of Conservation and the Ministry of Justice.
The West Auckland resident said work like his helped to beautify ugly places, such as bare walls and construction sites.
However, this year Jensen has been battling “toys”, or graffiti artists who tag over someone else’s art with the intention of wrecking it. One of his pieces in Henderson has been tagged about 30 times.
Jensen said that while it was frustrating for him and his clients when his art was vandalised, he had empathy for the taggers and understood why they did it: to lash out at someone who had permission to paint legally.
Jensen believed Auckland Council could curb offensive tagging if it provided more space for graffiti artists to paint legally. The council said it trialled this in the past, however the graffiti had spread onto adjacent properties.
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DOC is rolling out a new tool to help figure out what to tackle first when it comes to protecting our threatened species and the things putting them at risk.
Why does this matter? As Nikki Macdonald from The Post points out, we’re a country with around 4,400 threatened species. With limited time and funding, conservation has always meant making tough calls about what gets attention first.
For the first time, DOC has put real numbers around what it would take to do everything needed to properly safeguard our unique natural environment. The new BioInvest tool shows the scale of the challenge: 310,177 actions across 28,007 sites.
Now that we can see the full picture, it brings the big question into focus: how much do we, as Kiwis, truly value protecting nature — and what are we prepared to invest to make it happen?
We hope this brings a smile!
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