Ngurra / We Camp
Audio description
Text description
- Title: Ngurra / We Camp (2024)
- Artist: Elbows and Chris Edwards
- Wall size: 12.9 metres wide, with the tall section 6 metres tall, and the short section 1.9 metres tall.
- Location: East Village Hotel, 82 Darling Street, Balmain East
This work is a painted street artwork containing three images, one of the gumnuts and leaves of a eucalyptus tree, one of a dingo looking into Aboriginal fish traps, and another of a Baludarri (leather jacket fish). The artwork is painted onto the wall of a local pub, the East Village Hotel, and faces into the laneway of Union Street. Darling Street is the main road of Balmain, with a few local shops continuing into a residential streetscape. The work is divided into three distinct images by a thick painted black border, and all three sections are painted in a similar slightly impressionistic style, with clearly visible brush or spray work visible, rendering the work in a semi-realistic style.
The left-most image is set on the shortest single-story section of the wall, depicts the gumnuts and leaves of a eucalyptus tree. The leaves are a pale ashy green, with white line detailing around their edges and along the central veins that run down their centres. The two visible gumnuts are shown up-close, and are large, and green with edges fading into yellow and pink, with dark spots at their mouths, within which their seeds reside. The leaves and gumnuts take up the whole image, with very small flashes of a blue sky and background vegetation visible to the edges of the frame. Two vents from the building interrupt the artwork towards its top, one on the left and the other on the right. Obscuring it at its centre, a tall wooden telephone pile emerges from the laneway asphalt, displaying traffic signs. The artwork is framed not only by the black painted borders, but also by the gutter and the edge of a corrugated roof above, and a drainpipe to the left.
The remaining two thirds of the work are much larger, as the wall now ascends to the full two-storey height of the building. The central image depicts a pale-tan-coloured dingo, with inquisitive brown eyes, a black nose, and flecks of brown and white showing the shadow and light hitting its fur, examples of the visible line work of the artist. Its gaze is trained forward, focused on fish traps in the foreground of the image, a small one that sits at the bottom of the work, and a larger one that dominates this panel's left third. The smaller central fish trap is a net of fine white and black fibres wrapped around a brown timber structure, wider at its base where the fish enter, and narrow at the top where they are trapped. The trap is framed to either side by thin tufts of long dry grasses. The larger trap that takes up most of the left third of this image differs in construction from the central trap. At its top the sticks of timber that form the structure of the trap are tied together with a dark fibre, and its top third is open, without fibre wrapping. Its bottom two-thirds are thickly covered with dark brown fibre or wood branches, with patches of lighter brown, green and white giving the trap a different texture to the more transparent netting of the smaller trap. Behind the dingo and the fish traps, a background view depicts a blue sky with white fluffy clouds, partially interrupted by a window on the second floor of the pub. This view gives way to an orange skyline at the horizon, with glimpses of green hills and a body of blue water at the image's right edge.
The right-most third of the work is dominated by a single Leather-Jacket Fish, a Baludarri. The fish is depicted from one side with its head facing upward, and is black and grey in colour, with greenish-brown fins emerging from its top and bottom edges near its tail. It is largely oval-shaped, with extensions beyond this made by its fins, a narrower tailfin at its base, a narrow-pointed spike above its single visible eye on the left, a less prominent spike on its lower side on the right, and the rounded protrusion of its mouth at its top, which is interrupted by another window on the second floor. Behind the fish, a clear turquoise body of water fills the lower half of the frame, hugged on the right by rocky shores and foliage. Beyond this, the rolling hills and orange skyline of the dingo image continue, along with the fluffy clouds over a blue sky. At the top left of this panel, a string of white dots appear in the sky, stars, forming the constellation known as the "Dingo Puppies". In the bottom right of the frame, the signature of the artist Elbow is visible.
This is the end of the audio description.