Mid-morning in artist David Hourigan’s Yarraville home, I sit at the kitchen table and inspect his masterpiece: a scale model of Footscray’s late, lamented Olympic Donuts truck. After nearly 40 years of serving hot jam doughnuts outside Footscray Station, owner Nick Tsiligiris retired and closed the shop in 2016, leaving a trail of tribute. This is Hourigan’s own tribute. He’s painstakingly rebuilt the fallen icon from dozens of reference photos, creating a 1:20 scale model about the same scale of his daughter’s doll’s house.
“For some reason people love miniature things,” says Hourigan when I point out the comparison. “Models. Bonsai trees. Why do people love bonsai trees? I don’t know if it’s a flashback to childhood, or we want to be God… I don’t know. It appeals to the something in the human psyche.”
At the beginning of 2020, after over a decade as a commercial art director, Hourigan quit his job and turned to art. He’d hit upon a dream project: creating scale models of the disappearing buildings of the rapidly gentrifying western suburbs. (Artist Joshua Smith is documenting Adelaide’s buildings the same way.)
I peer in the slatted window of Olympic Donuts. The kitchen has been recreated. There’s a tiny tray of donuts on the bench, ready to go in the fryer, and a millimetres-long replica of the famous dolphin-shaped jam dispenser. The detail baffles the mind. The iPhone snaps I took of the model could have been of the real thing. On a quick scan of his Instagram, you can’t always immediately tell which are the models and which are the reference photos.
Hourigan specialises in the ragged, the rundown. Each model is thoroughly weathered, imbued with the rust and dirt that makes these buildings feel lived-in. These are endangered structures. They’re mostly not old or important enough to be heritage listed. They’re the sorts of buildings people don’t notice until they’re gone.
Hourigan brings out a few other pieces. A sole pigeon perches on the fence of his model of the Yarraville Racing Pigeon Homing Club, a little shack on Regent Street. Home to an obscure hobby still practiced by a dwindling number of dedicated pigeon trainers, the building is still there – just. It’ll soon be sold.
“I love the unloved,” he says. “That’s what I want to capture. It’s the stuff that’s slightly falling down, faded and covered in flaking paint. I see old buildings at risk of being knocked down and replaced with soulless units, and that makes me sad.”
Hourigan grew up in Sydney. “Sydney is very superficial,” he says. “Money and beaches. That’s not me at all. What I love about Melbourne is it’s a bit more cerebral, a bit more friendly, a bit more interesting.”
But even his Melbourne friends balked when he moved straight into the western suburbs.
“There’s a preconceived notion from a lot of Melbournians that anything west of the Westgate is no man’s land,” he says. “But these are such interesting, vibrant communities.”
I follow Hourigan upstairs to his studio, where patient work happens. It’s not a big space, but his isn’t a big practice. He uses small sheets of plastic card and insulation foam, little blades and fine paintbrushes. He shows me a wooden peg with a bit of copper wrapped around it that he uses to create a brick wall pattern in the soft insulation foam. He stamps each brick one by one.
Right now he’s working on a private commission. It’s a local house that the owners built a decade ago, all clean, modern lines and sharp edges. It’s a little out of his field of expertise.
“It’s not one I would have chosen,” he says. “There’s nowhere to hide. I can’t cover things in peeling paint and stuff. I have to be accurate!”
Like all of his commissions so far, this is a gift for a loved one. He’s recently completed work on a Cuban sandwich store in Key West, Florida, for which he was tasked with recreating as it was in the ’80s.
Also on his desk is the Footscray TV & Hi-Fi Service, still in operation on Buckley Street, Seddon, now surrounded by new developments.
In Hourigan’s re-creation, it’s closed. A sign in the window promises it’ll reopen on Monday June 24. I peer in the windows. It’s dark, but I can make a few things out. Flatscreen TVs in boxes line the walls. A sign on the counter that says “cash only”. A calendar on the wall advertises the Golden Dragon, a local restaurant. On the street outside, weeds grow up through cracks in the pavement, their tiny leaves carved from real leaves Hourigan collected in his garden. On the roof, there’s a little birds nest.
“It’s time consuming but you get into this zen place,” he says. He begins explaining how he thinks he’s going to recreate a particular light fitting on his current commission. “I spend a lot of time thinking about this stuff. It keeps me awake at night. That sounds really sad, doesn’t it?”
Not at all, I tell him. Peering in and seeing the detail on those obsessions is fascinating. It’s like peering in the windows of his models.
It’s satisfying, idiosyncratic work that gives him new challenges ever day. Some people don’t quite get his obsession. One woman nearly called the cops on him when she saw him taking measurements of a windowsill on the street. Admittedly, it was her house. He laughs about that now. But plenty do get it. He’s recently met the artist behind a graffiti piece on the side of the TV repair shop, after he’d replicated her work in miniature. The President of the Racing Pigeon Homing Club approached him after he saw some images of the model, and invited him to come visit the club before it was closed down forever.
“He showed me these 1940s photos of people holding pigeons they’re proud of, and trophy boards of famous thoroughbred pigeons, says Hourigan. “It’s incredible. I get to see things I’d never have seen and meet people I’d never have met.”
