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Scenes from the road
Great Big Arts
Small towns with giant canvases
Roads run straight in the wheat belt of southern Australia. The scenery is a tricolour of red earth, gold wheat and a sky of such even blue it looks as though it has been painted in one stroke. For kilometres, the tallest things in the landscape are eucalypts along the fence lines. Then grain silos appear, standing like Saturn V rockets on their launch pads. Concrete shimmers in the heat haze. Now in many rural towns, these drab silos are being turned into giant artworks.
It began in 2015, when grain co-operative CBH and arts group FORM commissioned mural artists Phlegm and HENSE to paint the grain company’s silos in Northam, Western Australia. Each artist worked on four silos over sixteen days. Together, Phlegm’s black and white images of fantastical flying machines, cross-hatched and stippled like an old engraving, and HENSE’s bright abstracts combined in a striking artwork.
The following year, Guido van Helten painted the GrainCorp silos at Brim, western Victoria. His monochrome portraits of Wimmera farmers set the theme for many of the later murals — people and place, people in place — grounding them in local communities.
Rural Australia embraced the idea. There are now dozens of silo murals spread across the country from Yelarbon in Queensland…
