How great the art
Australia’s burgeoning silo and outdoor art movement is invigorating rural communities.
FOR DECADES, PARTS of rural Australia have been identified, often in a playful way, with ‘big things’. You know, those oversized pieces of fruit – the banana, pineapple and the like – proclaiming a town or region’s claim to fame. Perhaps you’ve seen the giant merino ram, Ned Kelly, a well-configured bull, jumping trout or rampant crustacean. Depending on your taste, you might have admired these fibreglass, ferrocement or fabricated metal colossi as exuberant naive folk art, or dismissed them as tawdry, tourist-trapping kitsch. But whatever the response such expressions of local identity have provoked, there is no doubt big things have secured a particular place in our cultural landscape. Across the country, keen travellers often seek out, and affectionately tick off, the next big thing as they ply Australia’s tourist trails.
Now, three-dimensional big things face spectacular artistic competition for the traveller’s attention. A worldwide movement around urban street art – the adornment of building facades and public spaces with colourful, arresting and sometimes politically provocative murals – has reached the bush. And, as the popularity of mural painting spreads, monumental works now adorn previously bare and even defunct walls of rural industry across Australia.
In 2015 two international artists painted murals at either end of the CBH Group’s grain silo complex at Northam in Western
Australia’s wheatbelt. American Alex Brewer (aka HENSE) worked in broad abstract fields of bold colour, while Welsh-born Phlegm created a fantasy world of monochrome cartoon figures and flying machines. Despite being vastly contrasting creative expressions, the results were spectacular and entirely complementary. The seeds of a nationwide movement were planted – no pun intended. With just one silo complex so effectively rendered, there were obviously any number of blank ‘canvases’ of concrete and steel out there, ready and waiting for embellishment.
UNDER COMMISSION FROM rural businesses such as CBH, or at a grassroots level through the invitation and organisation of local communities, mural artists have been steadily working across the country’s concrete grain and cement silos, as well as giant steel water tanks and towers – from Pingrup in WA, to Colbinabbin, Goorambat and Patchewollock in Victoria, and on to Three Moon, near Monto in Queensland.
Probably little known outside their region, some of these new art locales sport names almost as intriguing as the murals they now display. By early this year across all mainland states, some 52 silo complexes and 91 water towers had been enlivened with the work of Australian and international mural artists, creating striking new cultural focal points in the rural expanse.
Silos are not a feature of the Tasmanian rural scene, but not to be outdone, several water tanks are getting the treatment there as well.
The trend is accelerating, according to Annette Green, co-founder and publisher, along with husband Eric Green, of the Australian Silo Art Trail – a definitive website, Facebook page and series of touring maps and guides. She says there were, in the first half of this year, “about 11 water towers on the go and it [had] only just turned into April”. Small towns have embraced the movement. Fresh colour on the sides of commercial and public buildings has given many a renewed vibrancy and sense of pride. With mural art trails now winding through their streets, rural communities are able to tell their stories and define a particular identity for visitors and locals alike.
Of course, there is a commercial imperative to this new art movement. Small communities see a benefit from being on the emerging rural art trail. Visitors spend money, and as knowledge of the trail and its attractions spreads, more travellers arrive and the local economy benefits.
Depending on the ownership of the infrastructure, projects are underwritten by government grants, private commissions or good old community fundraising. Sometimes it’s a slog. The town of Paringa in the South Australian Riverland have “just washed their brushes out – literally”, remarks Annette, “[after] fundraising for two years to get their silo up and running. They were certainly out there selling their cakes and lamingtons” – all the usual unsung hard work that goes into fundraising.
The only hospitality venue in Goorambat (population 297 in the 2016 census) used to be a single pub. “They have now opened up a coffee shop,” Annette says. “It’s not a lot of employment, but it has created at least one job.” And when the Nine Network’s Today Show arrived to feature Goorambat’s newly painted silos, the “whole town turned up [and] the tiny pub was overflowing”.
Operating in small collectives or working solo while suspended on gantries or perched on cherry pickers and scissor lifts, 30m or more in the air, mural artists mix and spread copious kilolitres of paint using industrial spray guns, broad brushes and rollers. Some even use multiple standard-sized aerosol spray cans. They brave heat, glare, wind and the threat of rain, to paint on a truly monumental scale. With or without the aid of guideline grids or projectors, they scale up projects from photographs and sketches to full-sized works across surfaces that are anything but flat. A deft eye and wariness to not get lost in detail when working up close are also in their tool kit. The size of much of their work makes their three-dimensional counterparts seem puny, prompting Annette to dismiss the big things as now being simply “old hat”.
COMPLETED IN FEBRUARY near Collie, WA, 200km south of Perth, is a mural project that dwarfs even the largest example of silo art anywhere in the country, and probably the world. Guido van Helten, the 35-year-old Canberra-born artist responsible, would not want reactions to the project to be obsessed with its size, but at 8000sq.m in area, this mega-mural is an extraordinary achievement, by dint of size alone.
Guido is used to large scale works. His startlingly photorealistic figurative works adorn apartment blocks, commercial buildings and industrial structures in many countries. Places in Australia where his silo murals can be found include Portland in New South Wales and Brim in Victoria. He was described to me by fellow artist Fintan Magee as the “silo master” for his understated yet heroic depictions of workers closely associated with the industries connected to each site.
In early February, when I first spoke by phone to Guido about his latest project, he was taking a break in his onsite shipping container work shed. He sounded exhausted, and with good reason. Almost every waking hour since November had been spent on the mural, and with only one on-site assistant, the pressure was unrelenting. Except for final touches or adjustments, the project had to be finished in time for an official unveiling on 19 February by WA Premier Mark McGowan.
Guido had just four months to complete it, and thousands of square metres of bare, rough concrete to cover. Such a large area in so short a time was daunting enough. But to compound his difficulties, Guido had an outdoor canvas that was anything but a uniform vertical surface. Rather, it was a curved and sloping dam wall – 367m long and 34m high.
A 30km drive from Collie, the Wellington Dam lies among the tall forests of karri, jarrah and marri in the 17,000ha Wellington National Park. The dam was built in the 1930s as a Depression-era jobs creation project. It supplied water to the Collie River Irrigation District, but the impounded waters also soon became a recreational magnet for the people of the region and visitors from Perth.
WHEN I NEXT spoke to Guido the project was done. A far more relaxed and relieved artist was then able to outline a few of the technical and physical difficulties that he’d faced and overcome through week after week of toil. “We had this crazy schedule,” Guido explained. “The scaffolders would come every few days to move the working platform, and there were 30 sections in all.” Each section of the mural had to be completed before the next appearance of the scaffolders on site.
“If I had run over time by even a day on each section, the whole project could be delayed by months,” Guido said. When all 30 sections were painted and the scaffolders had left the site there were still touch-ups to make. So the artist then became a mountaineer! The only access to the spots where the platform had rested against the wall was by abseiling from the roadway.
“The dam itself is a manufactured structure that doesn’t really belong there,” Guido explained, “so I took my cue from the colour of the rocks.” Rather than striking the viewer with a look-at-me giant splash of bright colour, the muted tones of Guido’s mural set the work into the broader landscape. It appears prematurely aged. Although only just completed, the mural looks almost weatherworn, very much at ease with its natural surrounds. Above all, it belongs.
Of particular concern to Guido was the durability of a mural exposed to temperature extremes and ultraviolet light. He was also particularly mindful of paint possibly cracking and peeling and for fragments of it to then pollute the river downstream. During heavy rainfall, water will flow over the dam’s spillway adding abrasion to the list of dangers facing Guido’s mural.
After extensive research, he settled on a water-based mineral paint of German manufacture that literally fused with the concrete, staining the surface layer rather than sitting as a vulnerable film over the top. The paint is also permeable and will therefore cope with hydrostatic pressure within the concrete.
The work is titled Reflections and depicts images of Collie locals; featuring two 1930s dam construction workers on the left, local Indigenous and non-Indigenous children, and ending on the extreme right-hand end with a historic image of two
Noongar Elders, representing the original custodians of the land on which the dam was constructed. Each figure depicted has a close connection to the site.
Guido spent six weeks researching and interviewing locals for the project, as well as collecting photographs and stories that would encapsulate the significance of the Collie River Valley and the Wellington Dam in the lives of the people. Rather than creating a predictable, and potentially overblown, celebration of the region’s industries – including coalmining, timber getting and agriculture – Guido’s central panels draw on the simple and intimate pleasures of childhood, of playing in the shallows at the dam on a hot summer’s day. These are small moments of connection that forever tie the subjects’ memories to that place. And while they are personal images, they are ones to which any viewer can relate. The children do not show their faces, so their anonymity expresses a feeling of universal pleasure.
The images appear as if they were old photographs stuck to the dam wall, complete with curling edges and the scuffs, creases and abrasions of much-treasured aide-mémoires. Those of the children could be anyone’s photographs, kept in an old shoebox and brought out from time to time in moments of fond reminiscence. Guido copied the photographs, carefully arranged them in his desired composition and “let water run all over them”, before finally rephotographing the whole arrangement in high resolution. But to then translate this photographic montage into a mega-mural required an attention to detail that Guido described simply as “… painstaking. There was no room for sloppiness.”
Reflections was always intended as the centrepiece of a wider Collie Art Trail. Within the town itself, 20 murals by WA artists
have been added in recent months to a collection of another 20, with one dating back as far as the 1920s. Funding for the entire project ran to $1.5 million.
The state government picked up most of the tab, and a heritage grant from the Shire of Collie council helped as well. Already, there are signs that the recent additions to the collection of murals has given the town a real boost. Even as Guido’s project was still a work in progress, according to Janine Page from the Collie Visitor Centre, tourist activity in the town and surrounds has “doubled and probably tripled”.
Collie’s industrial lifeblood has been coal, with two local mines exploiting WA’s only deposits. Janine remarks that with the inevitable decline in coal production, “diversification through tourism” would be critical to the town’s future. But with the Collie Art Trail, Guido’s Reflections as its main drawcard, and a host of natural attractions in the region, this WA town seems assured of a bright future.
IF GUIDO VAN HELTEN is the silo master, and now obviously the undisputed dam master as well, then Fintan Magee’s art must be ranked in the same league. Close in age to Guido, Sydney-based Fintan has also worked on large-scale mural projects all over Australia and overseas.
They are both exceptional draftsmen, but while Guido’s photorealism is, in Annette Green’s accurate assessment, “jawdropping”, Fintan’s looser and more relaxed style is equally effective in captivating the viewer.
I was able to savour and contrast the work of these two artists in one day by beginning with a visit to Guido’s silo mural at the former cement works in the old industrial town of Portland, 26km west of Lithgow, NSW.
Guido’s Portland figures aren’t portrayed in their prime as one might imagine if, say, the mural had been a Soviet-era glorification of the proletariat. Rather, they’re depicted as humble retired Australian workers, their long association with the cement works honoured in monumental form. A relaxed, almost self-effacing and dignified anonymity is chosen over portraiture, with all but two figures in a heads bowed pose, or with their backs turned to the viewer. Verging on the monochrome, the artist’s palette is appropriately dusty for such a group of old cement workers.
Onwards to Dubbo, a major regional centre in the state’s central west and a commission at the Dubbo Base Hospital. As part of a $50 million upgrade of the hospital campus and the construction of a dedicated cancer centre, Fintan Magee produced three murals there early last year. Rather than ‘street art’ per se, retrofitted to an existing building, space was deliberately left at the hospital redevelopment for appropriate murals to echo the concerns of the local community and the themes of help and healing. This was public art executed in a totally integrated manner.
Look past the accomplished draftsmanship of Fintan’s figures and the symbolism in his work is easily accessible. In a 2019 silo project at Barraba in NSW, Fintan, in the middle of the worst drought in living memory, depicted a water diviner confidently plying his craft. Similarly, when it came to the Dubbo Hospital murals, symbolism works closely with his deft mark-making.
Hospital administrator Kerrie O’Neill and local community member Lyn Smith kindly give me a tour of Fintan’s murals. The first of the works near the main entrance depicts three
Indigenous figures standing with their arms around each other. They look inwards, and as with Guido’s figures at Portland, are depicted with a nod to anonymity. “Painting an individual can be quite problematic,” Fintan previously explained to me. Singling out a subject might in time be a source of embarrassment. So he depicted members of the one family – three generations, each supporting one another but with their faces obscured in shadow or with their backs to the viewer.
In preparation for the Dubbo murals, Fintan consulted extensively with the Wiradjuri people of central west NSW to make sure his proposed work respected their cultural practices and sensitivities. The catchment for Dubbo’s hospital is immense, creating a particular problem for Indigenous patient care. “The mural represents family,” Kerrie explains, “and because our patients travel such long distances moving away from home, the role of the family is a big consideration when seeking treatment.” Fintan’s mural symbolises comfort and reassurance beautifully – for both Indigenous and non-Indigenous people of the Central West.
The second mural depicts bush tucker and bush medicine plants important to Aboriginal health and healing. It fronts the car park, and is the first art installation patients and visitors see as they approach the hospital. This giant piece of botanical art “immediately struck a chord with the public”, remarks Lyn. Vigorous and bold, loosely executed yet convincing in detail, and with a vibrant palette of deep greens, crimson and gold, it’s not hard to see why this work proved instantly popular. A little further on a large end wall faces the new cancer centre. “We were wondering what we could do with our big white wall,” Lyn continues, “because all the cancer patients would be looking at [it] as they undergo treatment.” An extension to Fintan’s commission was quickly arranged and a gorgeous third mural, again on a bush tucker and medicine theme, was the result.
Up close to Fintan’s work it’s not hard to see clues of his background as an artist. He uses the best-quality conventional acrylic house paint, but finds it necessary to add water to aid its spread. With his vigorous mark-making, dribbles are inevitable. But rather than wiping them away in the pursuit of perfection, he leaves them. They are part of the character of his work. They remind me of the graffiti artist, working quickly by necessity, always looking over a shoulder.
Graffiti and street art, of course, have common roots. They are both public art forms – one legitimite, the other more often seen as vandalism. It therefore came as no surprise to me to learn that both Guido and Fintan began their artistic lives in the graffiti scene. From there, it was formal art school training and on to international careers, but it’s obvious that time as kids spent honing their skills on the unruly side of the art world has done them no harm. They learnt to work quickly and decisively, lest they be caught. Perhaps, then, it’s not such a long way from tagging to the Dubbo Hospital, the Wellington Dam, or a concrete canvas anywhere in the world.
Time as kids spent honing their skills on the unruly side of the art world has done them no harm.