Block Party
Audio description
Text description
- Title: Block Party (2023)
- Artist: Sharon Billinge
- Wall size: 6 metres by 8.8 metres, 52.8 square metres
- Location: 89 Albermarle Street, Newtown
On the side of a corner terrace with a second story extension, a cream brick wall has been transformed. The house faces to the right, its narrow, fenced front yard overflowing with vines and a rubber tree. The street artwork renders six children many times larger than life, in orange, light blue, red and tones of brown. The figures have a blurry and smudged quality, light-soaked and slightly faded, as though looking out at us from an old photograph.
To the left of the artwork, set into the pavement is a tall and forked jarrah tree extending up beyond the house. Its leaves brush the apex of the wall. At the back of the house is a long wall of crumbling brown brick.
The street artwork references a photo taken in April 1935 by photographer Sam Hood of a group of boys clustered around a cart, with hessian bags full of discarded wood blocks on Cooks River Road, near St Peters station, a spot not 2 kilometres from where the artwork is now painted.
Discarded blocks were collected for firewood by working-class families during the 1930s.
In the artwork, against a backdrop of white brick, six children stand facing out. On the far left is a maroon cart filled with large wooden blocks and beside it stands a blond-haired boy, the second shortest of the group. He sags a little, squinting into the sunlight, gazing tiredly at us. He holds a hessian sack in his hands in front of his brown hessian trousers. One sleeve of a rumpled blue collared shirt is rolled up revealing his fair, right forearm. High on his left shoulder is a dark rectangle, a brick-sized air vent in the building façade.
Next to him is a slightly older boy with a round face, his curly hair pushed to the front and peaking out from his deep-red, flat cap. He wears a creased, cream shirt and loose orange trousers. His feet are hidden by a second maroon cart, tipped at an angle towards us and filled with stacked, hardwood blocks.
Behind the boy, in an orange flat cap, is an unsmiling child of equal height. His closed lips are set in a line. His slim frame angles to our right. He looks out at us from the centre of the work. wearing a short-sleeved, powder blue, collared shirt tucked into deep red pants which are mostly obscured by the cart filled with blocks. His belt buckle catches the light, and the fingers of his right hand are trailing onto one of the wood blocks.
He is crowded very close to a slightly shorter boy with cropped blond hair whose deep-set eyes are in shadow, his mouth closed and his expression wary. He has a maroon jumper (the same colour as the cart), a beige shirt-collar, folded over the neckline. In front of him stands a younger boy with cropped, white-blond hair, the shortest of the group. The boy squints, as though into the sun at the camera. His brow shadows his eyes, and his closed mouth is an almost-smile.
The boy's white shirt is too big for him, rolled to above his elbow on his right arm and hanging loosely around his wrist on his left. Both arms are folded in front, above too-big brown trousers held up by a belt with a flat brass buckle.
To our right is a girl. Her brown hair is side-parted and cut in a bob. She grins broadly, a sweet smile that shows her teeth and rounds her cheeks. Her clothes are comparatively modern, a short-sleeved, loose-fitting shirt cinched at the hips with elastic, over the top of matching knee-length, blue shorts.
A large, crumpled hessian sack spills from her left hand and to the right of the flowing hessian is the artist's signature in jaunty, neat red letters, Sharon Billinge.
This is the end of the audio description.