Women's Empowerment
Audio description
Text description
Women's Empowerment
by Wendy Sharpe, 2020
185 Church Street, Camperdown
Inner West Council acknowledges the traditional custodians of these lands, the Gadigal and Wangal people of the Eora Nation.
This brightly coloured mural by local artist Wendy Sharpe is on a long wall surrounding the back, side and front of a contemporary house. It is 30 meters wide and 1.7 metres high. The house is uniformly grey, has a garage at the back, a triple gate half way along the side of the house and a front door. Narrow horizontal windows run above the mural along the side and front of the house.
At the back, next to the garage, the artist has painted herself folding forwards from a standing position to draw what appears to be a full-size outline of a person on a long sheet of white paper.
She has short dark hair and is wearing light-blue jeans, a dark blue flecked top and tan lace-up shoes. One foot secures the paper. The background is loosely painted black behind the figure. The ground which she stands on is green.
Around the corner the background colours continue. Here you can notice the figure of a woman wearing red shoes and a knee length cream dress. She is cropped off at the waist. Three coloured circles with smiley faces drawn in them decorate the grass around her.
Next, moving from left to right, there is a painting of a girl in profile, facing to the right. Her long brown hair falls over her shoulder and the background here is dark blue with white dots. The girl's head reaches from the top to the bottom of the wall. A girl standing in a pink circle with a large yellow cross over it comes next, then a broad yellow crescent containing two figures follows. On the left is a dark-skinned girl wearing a red top and grey shorts. She has her knees hooked over a trapeze which hangs from the top of the wall. She holds her arms out to catch another trapeze artist swooshing down towards her from the right.
The background here changes again to a yellow and orange pattern with a portrait of a woman with her eyes covered with a message on white paper. It reads, "I am not free while any woman is unfree, even when her shackles are very different from my own. Audrey Lorde." From the bottom of the wall rise two hands each holding a sheet of paper with sketches drawn on them.
The grey louvered triple door interrupts the mural but it continues on the other side with a group of five females in a circle. Top centre is a white skinned woman with short grey hair. Then going clockwise, is a smiling young woman wearing a green hijab. Next, a dark-skinned woman with white hair and a scarf with indigenous patterns around her neck. Then, there is a young girl with almond shaped eyes and her hair in two short bunches, a girl with long blond hair and lastly a dark-skinned woman with a large curly textured hair. They all look relaxed and happy in each other’s company and the wall behind them painted in large geometric shapes of blue, red and yellow.
Around the next corner at the front of the house is another small mural next to the front door. It shows a girl standing against a night sky and the white outlines of a house behind her. She faces left, has a brown pony tail, blue knee length dress and brown boots and is almost as tall as the mural. Each hand holds a torch, which send out a triangle of light, one red and one yellow. The torch lights reflects back onto her clothes.
The mural is painted in bright colours and shows many women of different ages and cultures all enjoying each other's company.
This artwork was commissioned by Inner West Council through Perfect Match, a program matching artists with community to collaboratively produce site specific street art.
Audio description written by Vision Australia, and voiced by Nas Campanella.