Mali Heart Street Art

Created during the Mali Heart Arts Festival in Birchip in 2022, the Mali Hearts Art Trail is found in several locations around Birchip. The trail features stunning murals by renowned street artists who are passionate about making a meaningful and lasting contribution to the town, including a beautiful collaboration involving the Birchip P-12 school.

Working with the Buloke Shire Council and the local community, the inaugural festival in March 2022 brought the town together and attracted visitors from near and far to enjoy live art painting, augmented reality artworks, creative workshops, music and great food. 

The vibrant street art has brought life and color to the town – and put Birchip on the map as a must-see destination along the Silo Art Trail.

Location: Bales Garage
Artist: Heesco

Bales Garage has a long history in Birchip and the artist wanted to celebrate and incorporate the connections between Bales Garage, the town and the farming community. This was achieved by filling the background with a giant motif of a sunshine harvester overlayed across this is a green utility and an old farm truck filled with produce, potentially off to the city. On the left in a dramatic change of colour and a disruption to the composition is a lamb looking surprised and focused directly on the viewer. The colour scale moves between a blue sepia and modern realism just like Bales Garage and Birchip which has endured through time from the 19th century to the modern 21st century.

Location: TMC Enviro
Artist: Kasper/Blender Studios and the Birchip P-12 school students

Designed by Blender Studios this wall works off the theme of flora and fauna and was a collaboration with Birchip P-12 school. The challenge was how to create a beautiful mural whilst letting all the kids have a chance to paint.

An 8 layer colour by numbers was created and painted by hand, with most of the students in Birchip having the opportunity to have a paint. The workshop and the mural was facilitated by artist Kasper who finished off the mural with spray paint.

Location: Birchip IGA
Artist: Doyle

With this work, the artist creates an optical illusion, a beautiful moment for the viewer, or even an Instagram moment, for a visiting inner-city hipster. There are many things that unite us as humans; emotions, thoughts, feelings, and also experiences and objects. Objects like houses, plates, and grocery shops. Nearly everyone in the world has a local shop or milk bar and Birchip is no different - these shops are often the lifeline of a town and a meeting place for the community.

This artwork looks at the Birchip IGA and deconstructs the architecture of the building, creating a detailed brush and spray painted mural that brings aspects of urban life
to the country, and shows that behind every wall there is a
hidden world.

Location: Bourke's Butcher
Artist: Hayden

This piece looks at different aspects of the history and fauna of the town. The sunshine harvester looms big under a tree in the vast Mallee landscape. The sunshine harvester was a major part of the modernisation of farming in the region. A giant owl is looking over the town thinking of the past and using its wisdom to look to the future. The Plains Wanderer is searching for food in the foreground, the Plains Wanderer is an endangered bird that is a unique and important part of the Mallee and Birchip region. The figure in the tree is something Hayden brings to his art; it is about him and his own relationship to this land. The colour scale evokes the moment between day and night and is an important part of Hayden’s work and the Mallee landscape.

Location: Birchip Post Office
Artist: Maha

One of the things that struck the artist about Birchip is all the farm dogs - they are part of the fabric of the town. You only have to walk down the street to see farmers' utes with two or three Kelpies sitting in the back waiting patiently for the farmer's return, so they can get back to work. The relationship Birchip has with these dogs goes back over a century. The farmers love and respect their dogs, and the dogs are not just a workmate, they are part of the family. This mural is a Kelpie looking out over the Mallee landscape with the large Australian sky, surrounded by the occasional Buloke tree. A happy working dog in a beautiful landscape.

Location: bIRCHIP hISTORICAL sOCIETY
Artist: MAHA

The Birchip Historical Society on the corner of the Five Ways in Birchip is the site for Maha’s 2023 Mali Heart Mural representing the story of Bills’ Troughs. More information on Bills’ Troughs can be found on the Birchip Heritage Trail.

Location: The Birchip Hotel
Artist: Kaffeine

Kaffine has used her well known extraordinary painterly style to paint the myth of the Mallee Bull “Big Red”.

The story has it that some cows and bulls from the early farms escaped into the scrub and eked out an existence for themselves in the landscape. Not being native to the semi-arid area of the Mallee, only the toughest and most hardened of beasts could survive. One bull in particular – Big Red – was rumoured to roam the area alone, terrorising anyone in his wake.' (Kelly Fleidner) Kaffine has made a strong image of the bull rearing up along the Birchip Pub. With a myriad of techniques and paint, Kaffine has created a timeless depiction of this important story or myth.

Location: Watchem 
Artist: Adnate 

Adnate was asked by the Watchem Community to create a work on a mini-silo.

With the town's advice, he painted two portraits. On one side of the silo is the portrait of Ian McCallum and on the other side is a portrait of Graeme Lang. Both Graeme and Ian were heavily involved in the harness racing industry and became star jockeys, and famous throughout Victoria but particularly in the Mallee. Homegrown boys from Watchem. 

Adnate has used his renowned style and technique to capture a very realistic likeness of the subjects that is subtle in its application and respectful to the subjects.