Wellington Dam Mural - Wellington NP

Painted across a vast surface of the Wellington Dam in Collie WA, is the biggest dam mural in the world.
Abseiling equipment, suspended platforms and serious grit all played a part – but there’s far more to the story.
You may not expect a world-renowned artist to camp in the bush for four months while he’s creating the biggest dam mural on the planet. Nor might you think he’d dangle from ropes wearing a headlight, painting at 4am.
But Australian paintsmith Guido Van Helten isn’t your typical artist, and nor is the statement piece he coated 8000 square metres of the Wellington Dam wall with.
Reflections, as he’s titled the work, completed in February 2021, isn’t his first mega-mural. The 35-year-old has painted huge, lifelike human images inside a nuclear cooling tower in Chernobyl, coated apartment towers in India’s biggest slum and wore a bullet proof vest while painting a multi-storey building in the Ukraine.

. The 34m-high, 367m-wide wall finished construction in 1960 and forms the second largest dam in Western Australia, after Lake Argyle. It’s fed by the Collie River, which also happens be the source of Van Helten’s inspiration.

Van Helten sorted through countless photographs, stories and pieces of memorabilia before selecting six images to paint in dizzying scale. Looking at the dam wall, on the far left are two of the migrant workers who built the dam, posing as it overflows in the background. Beside them are a couple of local kids playing in the sand; they’re now in their 20s.
The wide, central image is of a handful of Aboriginal children on a picnic day out from Roelands mission; they play in the water with a little girl with blonde pigtails. To the right, a boy handles a fish; he’s now a 20-year-old apprentice at one of the local power stations.
Beside him, a picture of a dad with two kids; the girl to his left, Ashlinn Cain, is now grown up and helped Van Helten on the project. She, and the artist’s friend and fellow artist, Ian McCallum assisted with installing the mural.
The final image on the far right-hand side is of an Aboriginal couple; the original photograph is believed to be from the 1890s.

The first major drama was the lack of stable footings for a scissor lift or cherry picker to raise the artist up. Ideas for using a 250-tonne crane were also shot down. The next hurdle was the shape of the dam wall, which curves both vertically and horizontally.
“Luckily, I found a company in Perth who said they could custom build something,” says Robinson. “If you get the right people, resources and attitude, you can do just about anything.”
The company came up with a pair of 9.5m-wide floating platforms that could rise up and down the concrete surface. They were connected by wires to the top of the dam and could be rolled sideways once vertical sections of the work were completed. It meant Van Helten’s first draft also had to be his final one.

Guido and another painter standing on a custom-built floating platform
“Usually, mural artists mark out the entire image with chalk first. For this project, that couldn’t be done,” says Robinson. Instead, Van Helten mapped the image on a grid, and used coordinates stored in his phone as a guide.
As the work neared completion, Van Helten clipped into abseiling ropes to move more fluidly for final touch ups. “He spent a week on the abseil using an airless sprayer, which was fed by a hose going into big bucket of paint,” says Robinson.
Complementing the area’s natural beauty was key, so sympathetic colours were specifically mixed on site, for the job – a departure for the artist’s usual black and white palette.
“They blend in with the local granite and the environment. The blue-green jumper worn by one of the girls is the same colour as the moss on front of the wall,” says Robinson.
Not only did the paint need to be durable enough to withstand the dam periodically overflowing, it also had to have a neutral environmental effect so that the river, flowing below, remains unharmed.もっと詳しく