Bottles on a Windowsill

Audio description

Text description

• Title: Bottles on a Windowsill (2024)
• Artist: Fintan Magee
• Wall size: approximately Twelve metres wide, and nine metres high at its tallest, taking up the entire the side wall of a two-storey house, part of an apartment complex.
• Location: 2-6 Derbyshire Road, Leichhardt

Bottles on a Windowsill is a large street artwork depicting glass bottles and an antique water jug on a wooden windowsill shelf, partially obscured behind textured Art Deco window glass.

This work has been painted onto the side wall of an apartment complex, facing onto a residential common courtyard and driveway. The side wall is visible from the street when travelling in one direction, but not the other. 2-6 Derbyshire Road is located on a suburban street in Leichhardt, at the intersection point between Derbyshire Road and the more major Balmain Road. The immediate area is mostly residential with a few local shops, and notably next door, the building that formerly served as Leichhardt Hotel, from which inspiration was drawn for this work.

The wall onto which the artwork is painted is two stories tall. The artwork extends to the full height of the triangular roof, covering almost all visible space on the wall, including the guttering which slopes across the roof's edges. The work is interrupted by five windows: two windows of glass brick on the first level, two smaller horizontal clear glass windows on the upper level, and a final central window in the third attic-level of the house. The artwork is painted in a largely realistic style and has a rosy-pink and sepia-brown wash of colour that extends across its whole surface, influenced by the dusty pink background behind the bottles, which filters through the transparent glassware.

The work is divided into two halves by a faint line that runs vertically down the house about half a metre to the right of the central peak of the roof, formed by the edge of the Art Deco window glass. To the left of this line, the bottles are distorted through the textured surface glass, which echoes patterned glass found on the next-door Leichhardt Hotel. The texture of this glass looks as if it were created by countless oval-shaped impressions, which cause the light that passes through it to twist and distort the image of what is behind it, giving the left portion of the work an impressionistic appearance.

Occupying the left-most quarter of the work behind the glass, a stout brown glass bottle with a golden yellow label and a yellow cap spans the first two stories of the wall. Onto its label, text in brown is written in old blackletter script, with the words "ale", "old" and "port" visible through the glass; other writing on the label is indeterminable due to the glass' distortion.

To this bottle's right, occupying the quarter second from the left, another, taller brown glass bottle is narrower in width with a longer neck extending to halfway up the triangular roof portion of the wall, partially interrupted by the two small second level windows and topping out just below the third level window. It has a large brown and white label with text and images, all unrecognisable amidst the warped glass pattern through which it is viewed. Just behind and to the right of this bottle, another brown bottle of similar height is positioned with its left half distorted behind the patterned glass, and its right half emerging from behind it, much more clearly visible. It has no label, and its brown glass catches light revealing the textural impurities of its surface.

To the right a large, ornate antique water jug rises from the wooden shelf up almost to the height of the brown glass bottles to its left. It has a rounded, vase-like shape, with a wide, bulbous base narrowing as it ascends to its thinner neck. Its surface is clear glass, ornately cut with a diamond crystal pattern, with large tessellating diagonal squares wrapping its upper and lower thirds, with a band of a finer diamond pattern around its centre. At the top of the jug, a band of gold wraps around the rim of the bottle, decorated with a finely detailed baroque pattern, with a fine spout pointing to the left of the frame, a slender handle extending out and down the neck of the bottle to the right, and an open lid extending out of view beyond the roof-edge of the wall.

To the right of this ornate jug, a comparatively diminutive clear glass bottle sits open on the shelf. Its clear surface is interrupted by vertical bands of dotted texturing, and the sloped section that narrows towards its top is emblazoned with the partially obscured text: "FRISTRA".

Below the right-most bottle, two copper coins with silver reflections are placed on the wooden shelf in front of it. A single yellow lily flower with brown stamens is laid across the bench between the water jug and the brown bottles, blooming at the base of the crystal jug. Its stem and leaves appear orange rather than green due to the pink wash across the work. At the top of the mural, a frond of soft purple orchids extends between the water jug and the brown bottles, protruding out of view beyond the roof to the right. Indeterminate darker pink flowers emerge from behind the patterned glass near the top of the mural at the roof line. Across the left half of the work, splashes of yellow lilies, and dark pink and purple flowers are visible through the textured glass, but the bevelled glass pattern masks them from clear view.

This is the end of the audio description.