The Rebuild by Fintan Magee

The red sand, 1.5 cubic metres of it, was carried into the upstairs gallery in buckets, over a period of hours.The boat was acquired on Gumtree, for free. Magee built the model house, while its neon sign – which has the "l" painted out, and therefore reads "we come" – had to be custom-made.

Magee has been thinking about the floods and the preceding drought for several years, he says, "using my personal experience to talk about broader issues of climate change and displacement". The installation grew out of a mural called Queensland Flood Refugee Boat that he painted when he moved to Sydney two years ago. It "started out as a humorous piece about my journey to Sydney as a kind of cultural refugee when there wasn't much happening in Brisbane. But then it took on more global meaning, I wanted it to talk about climate change, displacement due to climate change, future movements of population. And some people in Queensland haven't been very accommodating to refugees. So it's a kind of reminder that we could all be in the same boat in 40 years time."

Magee, a street artist who has established himself in recent years as a mural painter, comes from a family with a creative interests; his father was a sculptor, his mother is a landscape artist. Graffiti was his first love. "There wasn't much of a street art scene when I was growing up," he says. "Everything revolved around graffiti, lettering, bombing, tagging." Going to art school, "I started to learn a little more and branch out a bit. At first they were separate, I would do oil paintings at school, graffiti on the weekend. After a year or two, they merged. And at that time, the street art movement was shifting, we were seeing more large-scale murals and sanctioned projects coming out of Europe and South and North America. I was seeing them online, and they appealed to me more than the stencil and poster art I'd previously associated with street art."

The sheer scale appealed to him, he says. And the internet has given mural painters a global profile. "There's a kind of circuit, and street art festivals around the world that have really become quite prominent in the past four years. You don't necessarily get paid, but they'll cover your flights and accommodation, they'll organise the walls and materials, and and there'll be five, 10, 20 artists all in the city at the same time." His recent invitations have included Atlanta's Living Walls, Tunisia's Djerbahood project on the island of Djerba, and the MOST festival in Moscow.