The enormous (2m x 1.5m) black and white portrait of him is going to be part of the paste-up decoration of a vast (45m long and 6m tall) white, and hitherto bare warehouse wall in Oaks Estate. The effect is going to be something to go ‘‘Wow!’’ at.

In our pictures, the portrait of the young Bede Tongs in his army uniform, and the portrait of late Oaks Estate personality Mrs Corsini are being experimentally fixed to the wall by Bowak in the days before the walloping, glue-undoing rains undid her work.

This Saturday Bowak is running a paste-up workshop for anyone and everyone who wants to bring along an item (for example a treasured photograph from a photo album) they’d love to translate and enlarge into big paste-ups to become part of the display on the wall.

Oaks Estate is one of the six fringe villages of the ACT (Tharwa, Hall, Uriarra, Pialligo and Stromlo are the others) being celebrated in the Centenary of Canberra Portrait of a Nation: Unmade Edges – Distinctive Places project. Bowak is one of 14 artists commissioned to create a series of art works for the festivities.

This project is a labour of love for her. She lives at Oaks Estate and has her discreetly wondrous workshop there. The workshop is in an old, industrial building and because she sculpts steely things it bristles with ‘‘blokey’’ contraptions like grinders and arc welders. Her terrific, perfect-for-a-workshop dog Bandit (partly border collie she named after the famous Indian feminist outlaw Phoolan Devi popularly known as the ‘‘Bandit Queen’’) adds to the authenicity of the workshop.

Bowak’s contributions to the Oaks Estate chapter of Distinctive Places are all based on the idea of valuing and appreciating the unique village.

‘‘Oaks Estate has been through all sorts of ups and downs and did have quite a bad name for a while. But the people who live here really value it. We think it’s just a gorgeous place. So I’m wanting to bring that idea of valuing the estate back in, in this case by changing the wall that was an eyesore into something for the community to feel good about. So I asked the owner’s permission and he’s pretty happy about the idea of it being continuously a paste-up wall [continuing after Distinctive Places is over] so that it’s a place we can go and make images and put images up long term. That would give the community some sense of control over how the estate looks.’’

In her workshop, Bowak has already made lots of big black and white paste-ups. They include many giant oak leaves, a supermarket trolley (they’re estate icons, she explains, because some locals have no cars and must push their groceries up the hill from Queanbeyan), of the snake from a Beware of the Snake sign down by the river and of a ute stuck in the nearby river). But after Saturday’s workshop she hopes to have many, many more.

‘‘This Saturday I’m going to be running the workshop at the community hall. I’m hoping that members of the community will come but I’m ready for a lot of people. I’ve opened it up to the public, so whoever wants to come will be welcome to make a paste-up to contribute to the wall. Loosely, I’m asking for paste-ups about what people love and value about Oaks Estate but these connections are different for different people so I’m open to what people want to make.’’

All people need to do is bring along an image that appeals to them and she will help them, using an overhead projector to project images onto walls and then permanent inks to do some tracings of vastly enlarged versions of what they’ve brought. Then on Sunday (weather permitting) she is going to supervise what she calls a grand ‘‘paste-up’’, which by late afternoon will transform the plain wall into quite a spectacle ahead of the official day of the Oaks Estate festival, Sunday, November 24.

By then another artist, Michael Starling, will be projecting eerie Oaks Estate-related pictures onto the iron flanks of the water tower that looms above the fringe village that nestles on the very edge of the ACT and so close to Queanbeyan that Bowak’s studio and the community hall are only a Frisbee’s glide from Queanbeyan’s dear little railway station. Dear black-and-white Bandit, bless her, though serene almost all of the time, has had a chequered past and somehow feels the need to bark at every train.

This Saturday’s paste-up workshop is in the Oaks Estate Community Hall (in William Street) from 10am to 4pm.