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Adelaide artist Jack Fran has brought a piece of local history to life with his latest project, transforming a section of the Mannum to Adelaide pipeline. Jack is a mural artist who has been painting around the country for the last decade, and his latest project impressively captures the history of the region on a large scale.
“I’m an Adelaide-based mural artist and I’ve been painting for 10 years now,” said Jack. “It’s something I really fell into; it came at the right time, just when it started to get trendy.”
Most recently, Jack has been working in collaboration on several projects with SA Water.
“SA Water had been in touch with me, I think this was like two or three years ago. When we first worked together, we did around 70 or 80 metres, and that project focused more on the Dark Sky Reserve. Recently this year, we headed to the Palmer community, which is closer to the pipeline and Mannum, and worked together on this latest project.”
Jack’s Mannum work tells the story of the pipeline, the installation and the history behind it. Jack worked with locals to workshop the design, telling their stories within it. “It’s an artwork of the pipeline, on the pipeline.”
Works like this come with a lot of challenges. “The pipeline is a different sort of canvas and it comes with a lot of challenges,” said Jack. “Even just the height, and because it’s quite long but actually quite small, it was difficult getting the artwork onto it.
“But I had a few tricks. Getting the scale of the artwork onto the canvas itself is the most important part. It took a bit of playing around, but I eventually got it done.”
Jack worked solo on this project. With larger-scale projects like this, he uses a spray gun to do the base coat and works to block in the colours. Then he goes over with a brush to do all the detail work.
Jack has plenty more going on at the moment, too. He’s just finished a silo in a town called Serviceton, just on the border of SA and Victoria. “The artwork is about a border dispute, about a disputed territory. When they were marking out the border, they actually got it wrong, so this town was meant to be in SA, and they got it wrong. So that’s what that artwork is about.”
Primarily, Jack is Adelaide-based, but always jumps at opportunities to work regionally and interstate. “I work most in cities, but I just go where the work takes me. And I often find the rural and regional towns more interesting. Every town has its own unique story. It’s fun to discover, research and learn about all these stories that make the town unique.”
Over the summer, he’s got a few mural projects coming up in Adelaide, some in Melbourne, Sydney and Brisbane too.
To keep up to date and check out more of Jack’s work, click here.
