‘Solarquins’ and salvaging skulls: Hayden Dewar’s surreal murals have an important message

‘Floating home’: located at the corner of Centre rd & Vickerey street Bentleigh

Just off Brunswick Street is a small primary school built with concrete, dulled under the cloudy Melbourne sky. With two coffees, a bag and my scarf in hand, I kicked at the wire fence to get Hayden Dewar’s attention, who was creating murals across the walls and up the pillars in the school’s play area.

He wore the Melbourne-street-artist uniform of a paint-splattered tracksuit and he was perhaps only half done, but already Hayden’s artwork was brightening the school’s dreary, bare walls.

We chatted on children’s benches cupping our coffees to warm our hands, and he told me the school commissioned him to paint the diverse faces of students and staff, with native flora and fauna weaving between.

Lately Hayden has been painting murals around the city so often he works as a street artist, painter and illustrator full-time, supporting his three children under nine years old – who sometimes help him out at the mural site or visit.

“Sometimes they’ll come to the site at the end of projects and help me clear coat. When they were younger they were a bit more impressed by it, but now they’re not as much into it,” he says, laughing. “Actually my daughter was here yesterday.”

His surreal style is easy to recognise and hard to miss from the vibrant colour that fills entire walls. Underpinned by a message of “salvaging” and environmental conservation, his paintings are whimsical, a little like what you’d find in a children’s picture book, with Australian natives and a recurring elf-like creature he named “solarquin” (like “harlequin”, he says, although coincidentally “Quin” is also the name of one of his children).

“I don’t really like the idea of it being an imagined place or an imagined world, I like the idea of the fantasy scene that I’m depicting to have a metaphor or a message,” Hayden says.

And solarquins, he says, are genderless “helper” creatures with sun-like faces, and represent the good nature of things who try to find a balance in the world.

“I like their facelessness, you can project whatever you want onto them.”

Solarquins can be spotted flying on vibrant bumblebees, rainbow lorikeets or turtles, or playing instruments on floating seashells.

More recently, solarquins featured heavily in his dreamy animation, “Infinite Phantasm”, which was projected nine-metres wide onto a building for Ballarat’s White Night festival. Created with VFX artist Julian Lawrence, the animation is, frankly, mind-blowing. Even watching from my laptop, I was totally captivated.

The work was born from Hayden’s personal sketchbook he says he used as a reservoir of ideas, and where the scribbles on every page connect to the page before. Sometimes he would skip a few pages ahead and then go back and join them up, but it was never originally intended to be an animation.

“I’ve done mural designs in that book. You’ll see all this random and weird stuff in it, and then you’ll see a piece you also might have seen on a wall somewhere.”

Julian Lawrence threaded the book into a single, pulsing video, and backed it with ambient music. And while there’s no narrative, Hayden explains there are recurring themes that arrived subconsciously.

“It’s more about the rhythm and the feeling it evokes,” he explained.

Hayden says solarquins occasionally show up in his personal paintings too, which seem more surreal and a little darker in subject matter than in his murals, often mashing reality with figures of death, birds and more pops of vibrant colour.

At home, he keeps a wunderkammer (“cabinet of curiosities”) to stash a collection of drawing references, often found in markets – skulls, old pieces of machinery, organic material like native flora and fauna and old tools.

“I like to take discarded things and do something with them, to salvage them and repurpose them, even the dead,” he says.

Stumbling on a cabinet with dead animal skulls and old tools would probably leave me with nightmares. I asked Hayden if he ever catches his kids poking around his studio.

“My son has a similar curiosity, he’s never been scared of skulls and things like that. I’ve actually given him a couple of skulls to keep on his desk, and other bits and pieces.”

At 41 years old, Hayden’s street art and personal artwork today is a far cry from the murals he created sporadically in his early 20s. In fact, if you’re a Richmond local, you’re probably familiar with Hayden’s whopping 50-metre long mural montage covering 150 years of Victoria’s history.

Artwork from ‘Wasteland of the gods’, Hayden’s solo exhibition at Off the Kerb gallery.

‘Life so far’, a privately commissioned painting.

This feat of street art was painted on the side of a Dimmeys. The mural is the result of more than four years of work from go to woe, although Hayden says the bulk of it was completed in the last six months.

Now, the mural stands as a cultural icon in Richmond and has survived a door being knocked through it, threats of destruction to make way for a multi-story apartment building and Hayden painting over Rolf Harris a few years later.

But for something so loved by the community, the mural left Hayden with sour taste.

“It left me feeling equal parts embarrassed because of how long it took, and a bit jaded. It didn’t lead to much more work,” he says.

“But I guess I broke even because it was also an awesome learning experience in terms of skill building. I hadn’t painted portraits that way before, so I learnt on the job, which was kind of insane.

“Also I think people that didn’t know me thought maybe I was really patriotic, but it was just a job.

“I got a lot of suggestions from passers by, and I was quite young and didn’t want to let anyone down. So the portraits get smaller and smaller as I try to fit more and more people in.

“The mural is something people who live in the area always refer to because there are images people remember from their past, or there’s something on there personal to them, and it resonates.”