I’ve probably walked past Coles Sandy Bay more than a hundred times without ever paying any attention to the mural on the wall alongside Sandy Bay Road.
An abstract montage of lines and shapes in the signature Coles’ red.
I enjoyed photographing the building but it was the red-covered windows along the Russell Crescent side that always had my attention.
Until one day, I stopped to read the plaque on the wall.
It reads
Coles Old World
John Vella
2004
Acrylic paint on board and stainless steel
Wait! This is an actual art work!
I had no idea.
I imagined the title to be a play on the “Coles New World” branding that the supermarkets used to have. It is, and if you do a google search you may come across John Vella’s commentary on how the work got its name. *no spoilers*
The plaque continues:
As a supermarket situated on the edge of a commercial and domestic precinct, this site embodies ideas and experiences related to shopping and home.
The abstracted designs of shopping trolleys reference the diverse actual, natural and virtual networks that define our lives. Divided by the stainless steel columns and distorted by the weather, light and your point of view, the painted lines become immersive, organic and elusive entities.
I couldn’t believe this work shows shopping trolleys and I’d never noticed!
It’s pretty obvious once you look though . . .
The sign states the work was commissioned by Coles and it had the support of Hobart City Council so I wondered if there was any more information about it, or the artist John Vella.
It turns out there is.
An old Tasmania Arts guide tells me that it was part of an Arts Tasmania public art program, and that John Vella’s “artistic landmark” “enlivens and improves what was a very drab space”.
John Vella, I learned from his own website, was born in Sydney and moved to Tasmania in 1996.
He’s currently a senior lecturer at University of Tasmania’s School of Creative Arts and Media. His website describes him as “committing acts of physical and conceptual frottage on communities, objects and systems; ‘rubbings’ that recycle the act and artefact of lived experience”.
I dug a little further and discovered John intended for the stainless steel columns that divide the piece to “reflect and so activate the work for the obliquely passing traffic”.
As you might imagine, the work also attracted vandals over the years, and people would sometimes park a shopping trolley in each bay. John says while the vandalism had started to break the work down, it was also “recreating the streetscape in an intuitive way that [he] came to enjoy”.
It seems that at one point Coles management initially attempted to patch up the damage and some time after this, in 2008 or 2009, they completely obliterated it.
John reports that he followed this up with the Council and Arts Tasmania, and there must have been some resolution as the art work is quite obviously back. (If you look at Google street view, the work isn’t there in 2009 but is back in 2015.)
In reflecting on the work and these events, John has made some thoughtful commentary on this series of events and perspectives of ‘do not touch’ versus art that is ‘alive’; permanence or evolution.
It reminds me of photos I’ve made of temporary spaces, temporary views, and the fact that the urban environment is in constant change. That’s one of the reasons I love photography: to capture those moments frozen in time because tomorrow the space might be different.
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