Bottlebrush Symphony
Audio description
Text description
- Title: Bottlebrush Symphony (2023)
- Artist: Hugues Sineux
- Wall size: Approximately 66 metres around, back and front, and on average 1.6 metres tall.
- Location: Piazza – Town Square, Summer Hill
This work is a long colourful frieze of local flora from the Inner West, including bottlebrush, grevillea, flowering gum and eucalyptus. Amongst the branches of these trees, native birds are positioned, such as superb fairy wrens, king parrots, rainbow lorikeets, kookaburras, New Holland honeyeaters, flame robins and magpies. The work's style is realistic, and the placement of the branches, foliage and birds in this frieze is organic, its wide horizontal form giving them the appearance of notes on a musical staff.
The Piazza is a central public town square on the main street of Summer Hill, and the dividing wall upon which the frieze has been painted forms part of the streetscape of the central commercial neighbourhood of the village. The work covers both sides of a wall that separates the Piazza from an accompanying carpark. Across the full width of the frieze, the flora and fauna of the work are painted against a cool eucalyptus green background, with a sky blue along its top, suggesting a horizon of hills against the sky. Throughout the work, the texture of the rendered cement onto which the scene has been painted is faintly visible.
Beginning at the left-most point of the wall on the town-square side, a blue superb fairy wren is perched upon a thick wooden branch amongst bottlebrush leaves. It has a white underbelly and white feathers framing its thin legs and feet, brown feathers on its wings, and a pattern of blue and black framing its neck and face. Its black tailfeathers stand erect behind it, appearing to balance its body over its legs. Amongst the branches, some of the bottlebrushes have flowered, with tufts of fine red stamens bursting from their stems, while others are yet to bloom, with green pods containing the still-developing flowers. Other branches are laden with gumnuts, which carry the seeds of the tree. Further along the wall, this first wren is joined by three others with similar white, brown, blue and black detailing, and one other, the female, identical in shape but with a simpler brown and white colouring.
To the right of this brown wren, ladybugs begin to appear on the branches, and two king parrots are perched on branches near an edge of the wall at the centre gateway in the middle of the square. Both parrots have green feathers and red chests, but the leftmost parrot's red extends up throughout its head, colouring its beak orange, while the rightmost parrot's chest shifts to green for its head, and it has a grey beak.
Across the open pathway that separates the wall, a rainbow lorikeet is perched amongst bottlebrush and grevillea flowers, which are fronds of coiled green and yellow stamens, somewhat similar in shape to a bottlebrush. The lorikeet has a distinctive pattern of green wings, a blue head, a red chest and a blue underbelly, with flecks of yellow visible throughout. To its right, as more ladybugs crawl across the foliage, a second lorikeet is bending down from a branch with its mouth open. To the right of the lorikeets, two more wrens, one blue and one brown, are standing amongst eucalyptus, grevillea and bottlebrush – the brown wren holding a small twig in its beak.
Beyond the lorikeets, flowering gum flowers in red with yellow centres emerge from branches amongst gumnuts, giving way to a group of three kookaburras. Each is squat in shape, with a white belly and head, with brown detailing around their eyes, and brown wings, with flecks of blue on their wings. They look inward towards each other amongst foliage and flowers.
To the right of them, at the far right of the square side of the frieze, new holland honeyeaters stand on branches next to white banksia flowers. The honeyeaters are black and white, with flashes of yellow feathers through their wings. Their eyes are wide open, and their feathers appear fluffy amidst the fine striped black and white pattern that covers their chests and bellies.
Following the frieze around the corner of the wall towards the carpark side, a flame robin stands on a banksia branch, with a deep crimson chest, white flanks and underbelly, black wings and face with an orange patch from the top of its beak over the back of its head. Continuing around the corner, it is accompanied by two more robins sitting amongst bottlebrushes, with slightly different colouring – without the orange head patch, and with less white on their bellies.
Continuing across the carpark side of the wall, this pattern is continued with kookaburras and wrens perched upon the branches of flowering gum, bottlebrush, grevillea and eucalyptus, until towards the central gateway, a group of three magpies along with one or two ladybugs are assembled amongst the branches, the magpies with black faces, white necks, and black and white wings. Across the gateway, the remaining wall of the frieze depicts wrens and honeyeaters, amongst bottlebrush branches.
This is the end of the audio description.