Desert Gums
Audio description
Text description
- Title: Desert Gums (2024)
- Artist: Helen Proctor
- Wall size: Varying heights of between 3.6 and 3.9 metres, with the back garage section up to 6 metres. Approximately 33 square metres.
- Location: 286 Unwins Bridge Road, Sydenham
286 Unwins Bridge Road is a modern, two-story corner apartment building, in muted light grey with a shop front on the ground floor, punctuated by 6 panels of windows, a safety door an alcove, and 3 panels of louvers that provide air to the ground floor garage.
The street artwork adorns much of the ground floor around the building's architectural features. Helen Proctor's artwork is an abstract collection of overlapping, jagged shapes in deep brown, navy, khaki, pastel-olive, indigo, light blue, peach, pink, lime and yellow. A riotous, non-repeating pattern of mountainous polygons, calling to mind valleys and rolling plains.
On Unwins Bridge Road, in the building entrance's alcove, black floor tiles meet a 3m high wall covered in sections of brown, vibrant light-blue, pink, pastel green and orange. At the top of the wall, sharp, hill-like shapes in five shades of brown meet a section of predominantly pale pink sky, with long, angular sections in darker, dusty pink at the very top. Many overlapping coloured polygons vie for space between the top and the bottom, of this section of painted wall.
Beginning in a slim slice of concrete below a window on the building's corner bearing the word "Podiatry", are blocks of colour in brown, pink and purple. Around the corner, a diagonal section of wall remains pale, greenish grey, the other half is a mounting collection of angular pink and brown polygons with the occasional shape in a pop of lime or aqua-blue. In the top right are dark and light pink asymmetrical blocks, a few float in the greenish grey, like small islands.
Six, tall glass window panels interrupt the artwork colours as it continues across the building's side wall. Around a narrow exit-door alcove the jagged hill motif continues. Two bold, uneven shapes in the bottom right adjacent to the alcove stand out, egg-yolk yellow on navy. Other polygons in two shades of light blue and light green riot toward the centre. There are long shapes in brown and pink at the top. The exit door remains light-grey and all around it is a clatter of colour.
The narrow walls between the metal louvres are joyously painted in similar hues.
On the building's rear corner, over the top of continuing jagged shapes, the artist has painted a forked, white tree trunk, rising from a brown and pink mound. In the aqua-blue and pink hilly-distance is a white house with a single, grey rectangular door and a grey, slanted roof. Around it are long sections of peach and yellow. Behind the house are brown hills in a two-toned, pink sky.
Beside the white gum tree is the wide garage door. Here, the flinty artwork of brown hills, pink skies, and blocks of occasional blue begins to climb up, past the second story balcony.
The artwork's pink skies stop in a clean line, level with a long window at the rear of the property, meeting the muted light- grey of the second story above.
This is the end of the audio description.