There’s a three-storey eagle crash-landing on Stafford Street and most of Dunedin walks right past it. Painted in 2014 by Chinese-born muralist DALeast, Defoliation turns the side of a warehouse into something between a natural history lesson and an act of mourning – a Haast eagle assembled from industrial wreckage, frozen in the moment before impact. It’s one of the first and finest pieces on the Dunedin Street Art Trail, and all it asks is that you look up.
The Artist Who Works in Shrapnel
From Wuhan to the Walls of the World
DALeast grew up in Wuhan, studied sculpture at the Institute of Fine Arts, and by all accounts found it stifling. He dropped out, joined a graffiti crew, and started painting on anything that wasn’t a canvas in a classroom. By the mid-2000s he’d left China entirely, eventually settling in Cape Town – a city that, like Dunedin, knows something about reinventing old walls.
What makes DALeast recognisable from a moving car is his technique. He paints animals – birds, mostly, but also mammals, sea creatures – that look like they’ve been assembled from a thousand shards of twisted metal. The forms are enormous, often spanning entire building sides, and they seem to hover between construction and collapse. He’s painted them in London, Rochester, Johannesburg, and Lodz. And in 2014, on a wall on Stafford Street, he painted one here.
What That Metallic Style Actually Does
Stand close to a DALeast piece and you see chaos – tangled lines, fractured strokes, dark over light over dark. Nothing resolves. Step back ten metres and a bird emerges from the mess, fully formed and tensed in mid-movement. It’s an optical trick that works because your brain wants to find the animal in the abstraction, and DALeast knows exactly how much to give you.
The effect is deliberately unsettling. His creatures look alive and disintegrating at the same time, as if the natural world is being held together by industrial scaffolding that’s already failing. There’s a tension between organic form and mechanical texture that runs through everything he does. It’s not accidental – DALeast has talked about the collision between natural and artificial worlds, the way cities consume the landscapes they were built on. His animals are beautiful, but they’re also wounded. That’s the point.
Why Dunedin Got a DALeast
The short answer is the Dunedin Street Art Festival. In 2014, a group of volunteers – the people who would become the Dunedin Street Art Trust – invited a handful of international and local artists to paint ten walls around the city. It was a small operation: find the walls, raise the funds, match the artists. DALeast was one of the internationals. He got the side of a building at 25 Stafford Street and four days to fill it.
This was early days. The street art trail that now winds through the warehouse precinct and beyond – fifty-plus commissioned works and counting – didn’t exist yet. DALeast’s mural was one of the founding pieces, painted at a point when the programme was still proving it could work. That it drew an artist of his calibre in the first round says something about the people behind the Trust, and possibly something about what Dunedin offers an artist looking for the right wall.
Defoliation – Reading the Wall
A Haast Eagle Made of Wreckage
The mural is called Defoliation, and it depicts a Haast eagle in its landing motion – wings spread wide, talons extended, body angled down toward the earth. Except the eagle isn’t intact. It’s rendered in DALeast’s signature fractured style, the body disintegrating into shards of metal and mechanical debris as it descends. The face is shaped like an aircraft cockpit window. Wheels and structural fragments trail from the form as if the whole creature is a machine breaking apart on impact.
The title is deliberate. Defoliation means to strip away – leaves from trees, cover from a landscape. Applied to a bird that was itself stripped from existence, it carries a weight that goes beyond art jargon. This eagle isn’t soaring. It’s crash-landing. There’s no triumph in the image – just the last kinetic moment of something enormous arriving at a surface it won’t leave. DALeast reportedly took four days to paint it, and the compression of that effort into the sprawling violence of the finished work is part of what makes it feel urgent even now.
The Weight of What We Lost
Haast’s eagle was the largest eagle known to have lived. Its wingspan stretched to three metres. Its talons were the length of a tiger’s claws – nine centimetres of bone and keratin designed for pinning down prey that weighed two hundred kilograms. That prey was the moa, and when the moa were hunted to extinction around 1400, the eagle followed. No prey, no forest, no eagle. The whole system collapsed inside a few generations of human arrival.
In Maori tradition, the eagle is the Pouakai – a predator so fearsome it features in legends of a giant bird that carried people from their villages. It’s not a mythical creature in the way a dragon is mythical; it was real, it was here, and it’s gone. DALeast threaded that loss into the mural by constructing the eagle from man-made materials. The bird is literally built from the kind of things that unmade it. A Chinese artist standing on a ladder in Dunedin, painting an extinct New Zealand raptor out of industrial wreckage – there’s something in that gesture that earns the space it takes up on the wall.
Standing on Stafford Street
The Building and the Angle
Twenty-five Stafford Street is an unremarkable building until you step back from it. The mural covers most of the upper side wall, positioned high enough that you won’t catch it from a car or a quick walk along the footpath. You need to stop, cross to the other side of the street, and look up. From there, the eagle fills your field of vision – wings spanning what feels like the full width of the building, the fractured body seeming to descend toward the pavement.
The warehouse precinct setting matters. Stafford Street sits in the part of Dunedin that’s been steadily converting from industrial storage to studios, bars, and creative spaces. The old warehouse walls are the right canvas for this kind of work – large, flat, industrial in texture. The eagle’s mechanical fragments blend into the building’s own rough surfaces in a way they wouldn’t against a suburban weatherboard or a modern glass frontage. The architecture and the art share a visual language of utility and age.
The Company It Keeps
The DALeast mural was early, but it wasn’t alone for long. The area around Stafford Street and the broader warehouse precinct has accumulated commissioned works steadily since 2014. Phlegm‘s intricate black-and-white figures appeared nearby. Sean Duffell and other local artists contributed pieces that reflect Dunedin’s own stories. The Dunedin Street Art Trail now maps a walking route through fifty-plus works, and the precinct is the densest stretch.
But scale separates the eagle from most of its neighbours. Plenty of the surrounding works are technically impressive or emotionally sharp – the trail has genuine variety and real ambition. What DALeast’s piece does differently is dominate its wall. It’s not a design on a surface; it’s an event happening to a building. The eagle’s descent has a physical presence that changes the street it’s on, and that kind of spatial authority is rare even in a city with this much art on its walls.
Walking Past vs. Looking Up
Here’s the thing about public art on the side of a building: most people never see it. Not because it’s hidden, but because we don’t look up. We navigate streets at eye level – footpath, shopfronts, parked cars, the person coming the other way. A mural two storeys above the ground might as well be on the moon for the average commuter heading down Stafford Street to get a coffee.
And yet once someone points it out – or once you happen to glance up at the right angle – the eagle is impossible to un-see. That’s the particular gift of street art over gallery art. A painting in a gallery asks you to go to it. A mural on a wall waits. It doesn’t charge admission or keep opening hours. It just needs you to change your angle by about forty-five degrees and give it ten seconds. The reward for those ten seconds, in this case, is a three-metre extinct raptor made of shrapnel, frozen mid-crash above a street you’ve walked a hundred times without noticing it was there.
What Street Art Does to a City Like Ours
Not Decoration – Conversation
It would be easy to treat Dunedin’s street art as decoration – bright pictures on old buildings, a splash of colour in the warehouse precinct. And some of it works at that level, which is fine. But the best pieces, and Defoliation is one of them, do something more complicated. They talk to the place they’re in.
Consider the layers here. A Chinese artist, working from South Africa, paints an extinct New Zealand eagle on a repurposed warehouse wall in a city that’s quietly reinventing its industrial quarter. The bird is assembled from man-made debris – the same kind of material the warehouses once stored and shipped. The subject is local extinction; the artist is international; the medium is the city itself. That’s not decoration. That’s a conversation between an artist, a subject, a building, and a place – and it only works because the Dunedin Street Art Trust was willing to hand a wall to someone who’d do more than fill it.
A Decade On, Still Landing
It’s been over ten years since DALeast spent those four days on Stafford Street. The paint has weathered – street art always does. Dunedin’s southern light and coastal air are not gentle on exterior walls, and Defoliation has softened in places, its edges less sharp than when the scaffolding came down in September 2014.
But the image hasn’t faded in the way that matters. The eagle is still mid-descent, still breaking apart, still frozen in that moment between arrival and disintegration. Public art is impermanent by nature – it doesn’t get climate control or conservation budgets. It lives on the side of a building until the building is repainted or demolished, and that’s part of what makes it honest. DALeast’s eagle will eventually disappear from Stafford Street. For now, it’s still landing. And if you walk past 25 Stafford and remember to look up, you’ll find something worth the pause – an extinct predator, reassembled from wreckage, still commanding the wall of a city that was smart enough to offer it one.
Dunedin has a way of putting extraordinary things in ordinary places and waiting to see who notices. DALeast’s eagle at 25 Stafford Street is exactly that kind of quiet challenge – an extinct predator built from the debris of progress, painted on the side of a building in a city that keeps finding reasons to look at its own walls more carefully. Next time you’re in the warehouse precinct, cross the street and tilt your head back. The eagle’s still there, still landing, still worth your ten seconds.