Over the past three years the PUBLIC Silo Trail has created a massive outdoor gallery from the towering architecture of farming communities across Western Australia’s Wheatbelt and Great Southern regions. It has put country towns on the cultural map, bringing elite art to CBH Group grain silos, public walls and Western Power transformer boxes across the state. The latest towering mural, at Newdegate in the Wheatbelt, depicts native Western Australian wildlife – western bearded lizard, mallee fowl in front of a salmon gum, thigh spotted tree frog and red-tailed phascogale – on the Newdegate CBH Group silos. This is Perth artist Brenton See’s fifth mural in FORM and CBH Group’s PUBLIC Silo Trail, joining artworks spanning the state by local street artists Amok Island and Kyle Hughes-Odgers and internationals Phlegm, HENSE, and Yok & Sheryo.
Public Silo Trail, Newdegate – Brenton See
The final mural in the four-part series is an emblematic depiction of the region. It features a droplet shaped form, half-white, half-teal. The white and teal droplet represents both the rain; essential to growth: and the surrounding lake systems which support many insects and animals at different times of the year. In the background are coloured squares illustrating the land, and how it appears from above: green for the green bushland areas and brown, orange and red for the red dirt and rocky areas.
Public Silo Trail, Newdegate – Brenton See
These images reflect See’s love for nature, specifically birds, confessing if he weren’t an artist he’d be a park ranger. ‘My passion from birds came from travelling between Perth and Busselton when I was younger and going from the city to the bush landscape and being around the birds,’ says See. ‘I think my oldest memory is sitting in my grandma’s large budgerigar aviary for hours every day whenever we visited.’
As part of the PUBLIC Silo Trail, social documentary project Homegrown Stories has been cataloguing the personal narratives and remarkable histories of the men and women growers, regional workers and local community champions in each of the towns on the trail. These stories will be presented on completion of the trail, shining a light on the people who make these regional towns what they are.
