Street artist Rone is taking a flamethrower to old furniture and art

Rising above the forlorn scene of abandonment, a large reproduction of Frederick McCubbin’s 1890 A Bush Burial – part of the gallery’s permanent collection – will hang on one wall. Its mourning graveside arrangement of four human figures and a dog will be tinged with soot.

Wright has torched copies of portraits from the era as well as historical Geelong landscapes, the originals of which are also drawn from the gallery’s collection.

Born and raised in Geelong and today working in a Collingwood studio, Wright is best known for pasting up and painting portraits of young female faces on the facades of industrial buildings and inside abandoned homes around Geelong, Melbourne and overseas.

He started his career decorating skateboards and skate parks, but gave the sport up after breaking a wrist in 2007, realising such injuries could harm his living as a graphic artist.

Wright began painting female faces as an antithetical response to a fellow male street artist who was painting a vampire, “a bit of yin and yang out on the street – his screaming vampire and my calming beauty”.

Wright’s art evolved to juxtapose such beauty with decay, reflecting his fascination with “the way that everything on the street slowly gets destroyed and falls away”, he says.

“The works I do on the street actually look their most beautiful or interesting in their final moments, when the elements are starting to eat away at them.

“When something’s more fragile, it seems more beautiful and more important; it makes you focus on it. It’s the reason you go and visit your grandmother more than your auntie: there’s a limited time you have, so you appreciate her more.”

In another room at the Geelong Gallery, Wright is building a three-dimensional, life-size diorama or tableau that recreates part of his 2017 work inside an abandoned home in Alphington in which he painted huge mural portraits of young women.

Having his first comprehensive survey in the city where he was born after a two-decade international career has earned Wright firm family approval.

“I’m hugely honoured and proud,” he says. “I’ve done work in London and a lot of stuff in the US, but it’s not tangible to a lot of people that I’m around. I remember when I got a mention in the Geelong Advertiser that my grandmother twigged; she thought that was huge.”

Street art has changed considerably over the past 20 years, he says.

“When I started, there was the likes of [UK artist] Banksy and [US artist] Shepard Fairey … they were kind of cool and famous to us [artists], but it was very underground,” he says.

“The biggest thing you could be was a T-shirt maker, like [US fashion designer] Marc Ecko, who came from a graffiti background.

“Over the next 10 years, the world started to accept the whole street art thing, and that allowed people to paint larger walls, and we started to get council and commercial involvement.

“Then the whole street art mural festival thing exploded in the early 2010s, and I really got on that circuit and travelled around a lot. It hasn’t really stopped.”

Wright says the Bush and Trump US presidential eras added a political edge to street art.

“My wife and I have a joke – whenever the politics is bad, at least the graffiti is good.”

Rone in Geelong is at Geelong Gallery from February 27 to May 16.