Last Days of the Mill: Sandblasting the Risdon Mural

Three concrete panels measuring roughly 7x8 metres were sandblasted with a design featuring art by Tony Thorne and poetry by Pete Hay on Friday. They will form a large section of the new gymnasium at Risdon Prison.

The original design featuring poetry by Pete Hay and art by Tony Thorne.

Moving concrete panel 1 into place for sandblasting.
The stencil is already in place.

Checking the vinyl stencil is down tight.

Sandblasting.

Checking the first sandblast pass for depth.

Vinyl and adhesive residue is removed.

A detail of panel 1 finished.

Panel 2 mid sandblast

Panel 3 with vinyl partly removed.

Panel 3 complete with Pete Hay's poems.

The Poet

Pete Hay was born and raised on Tasmania's North-West Coast. He is a poet, essayist and social theorist who taught geography, politics and philosophy at the University of Tasmania until he retired to get a life. He has worked as a political minder, and has dabbled in activism and public affairs commentary, but is a refugee from all that, too. His once-endless slate of interests have now shrunk back to the beauty within language, music, cricket, football, the extraordinary cacophony of life on earth - and the marvellous stories that ordinary people carry with them. Except that he is of the opinion that no person is truly ordinary. His most recent publications are Main Currents in Western Environmental Thought (social theory), Vandiemonian Essays (personal essays), Silently On The Tide (poems) and, with the photographer Matthew Newton, the photo essay with text, The Forests.

The Artist

Tony Thorne is a Burnie boy. He is an animator, an illustrator and an artist who learned to draw on the Burnie Bond paper his grandfather would bring home from the mill. In the summers while at art school he would work maintenance shut downs at the mill.

He has illustrated books of Tasmanian aboriginal poetry and worked for magazines such as Australian RollingStone. He has animated on many feature films including several in the Harry Potter series. His art for Last Days of the Mill has been exhibited in both Burnie and Hobart and some of the works are now held in the Burnie Regional Art Gallery collection.

Sandblasting the Risdon Mural

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