canberra

Warehouse Circus: Carnivale Puppet Parade at Floriade

Posted by hil

Resting

Over the last few months most of my time has been taken up with a number of projects to do with Floriade, Canberra’s month-long annual spring flower festival, which finished last weekend. My biggest scale project was taking workshops with a group of kids from the Warehouse Circus, collaboratively designing and helping them to make some big puppets for a carnivale puppet parade during Floriade.

Robin Davidson was the artistic director, bringing together the eight characters the kids had proposed (The Dude (from the circus logo), the Evil Gardener, two tulips, The Pie, Mirrorman, Mini Me, and a pirate) into a kazoo band.

We used quite a broad range of building techniques and materials, many of which the kids hadn’t had experience with before. Six of the characters were on stilts, some on extension stilts, and I was really impressed with how well the kids took on the physical and mental challenges of performing the characters, and the level of confidence they developed.

Video clip: Click picture to see the Warehouse Circus Carnivale Puppet Parade.

Alas poor Daisy, I knew her well…

Posted by hil

It’s the local Australian Science Festival in Canberra, as well as National Science Week. In today’s Canberra Times there’s a picture of a CSIRO Double Helix Science Club educational demonstration in which a presenter is extracting methane from ‘a life-sized flatulent cow called Belching Buttercup’. I recognize the cow as my dear Daisy. Poor Daisy. She has been given makeshift ill-proportioned spotty hindquarters, and Double Helix stickers, and while it’s nice that she isn’t in storage and is kicking up her heels in a new life, I kind of wish she hadn’t become grist for the endless ‘kids will only get into science if they think its gee-whizz fun’ mill, and the tiresome and inaccurate ‘kids are only interested in fart jokes and icky smelly substances’ attitude:

“Belching Buttercup is a new edition (sic) to the show. The whole idea is to show kids climate change and greenhouse science in a fun way that they are going to remember. When you look at it, it may just be one long fart joke, but it is really a profound way for kids to remember about climate change and some of the ways they can solve it, and that is a really important message.”

So they should stop farting? Of course, there is nothing wrong with a good fart joke. But kids are generally wonderfully curious, interested in making sense of the world around them and how it works (maybe more than adults), and they make connections in novel ways because they are new to the world. I think it does them a disservice to expect that they will not be interested in anything unless it’s presented as a fart joke.

Impermanence

Posted by hil

Today I am continuing making a costume: decorating a suit so that it suggests a mainframe computer. Don’t ask. I’m using some of the stencils that I made for my computer bug traffic control box painting last year. I eventually found out that the reason the painting had disappeared was because a car crashed into it and totally demolished it! I asked about the remains, but they had already been disposed of. I could paint the box again, but I decided, at least while it’s winter, to meditate on the beauty of process and impermanence in art ;-).

Computer bug box

Posted by hil

Computer bug

This is one side of my ‘computer bugs’ traffic control box, done for Colour-in Canberra. It’s on the corner of Corrina and Callum Streets in Woden. If you’d like to see the other sides and top, there are a few more pictures here. I think people are likely to interpret them as gremlins, but to me they are about becoming involved with the intricacy of the internet, and how rich an experience that can be.

So much depends upon a red dovecot…

Posted by hil

A bunch of local tertiary students had an installation of dovecots at Floriade this year. I was really happy with this photo of one of the dovecots.

Dovecot

It reminds me of that lovely William Carlos Williams poem, ‘The Red Wheelbarrow’:

so much depends
upon

a red wheel
barrow

glazed with rain
water

beside the white
chickens.

Or even Dylan’s ‘Buckets of Rain’:


Little red wagon
Little red bike
I ain’t no monkey but I know what I like.
I like the way you love me strong and slow,
I’m takin’ you with me, honey baby,
When I go.

I also liked seeing these ones as different faces. It would be fun to animate them!

Making the most of Floriade’s Rock & Roll theme were The Extremes:

And this captured some of my feeling about Floriade:

Catching up with Floriade

Posted by hil

Rock & Roll Rascals: Big Bad Teddy and Long Tall Sally

The Fool Factory‘s Rock & Roll Rascals, Big Bad Ted and Long Tall Sally rock it up during this year’s Floriade in Canberra. I made Ted’s winklepickers and Sal’s legs and shoes.

Colour-in Canberra

Posted by hil

tcb

Urban services here in Canberra is running a competition for the opportunity to participate in painting designs on 30 traffic controller boxes around the city. Its a good idea; I hope to put in an entry. The competition was launched a few days ago with the unveiling of this first painted box by Franki Sparke. It’s at the corner of Limestone Avenue and Wakefield Avenue in Ainslie. I’ll have to go for a drive and take a look – I wonder what’s on the other side?

Street Art

Posted by hil

Graffiti_1Canberra has been convulsed over the naughtiness of one of the local government’s staffers who was caught doing a spot of anti-Howard stencil graffiti. You have to hand it to local politics for making mountains out of mole hills!

If you are interested in street art, take a look at The Wooster Collective: A Celebration of Street Art. They have some very cool images. For example, here is a Salvador Dali mural in Lima, Peru. They had an exclusive report on Banksy‘s activities in mid March, showing the works that he installed in four of the prestigious museums in New York.

There is also Wooster Mobile, ‘a Wooster curated art gallery of images which you can download onto your mobile phones in cities around the world’. The aim is to provide artists with a new revenue stream and at the same time generate funds for a non-profit organization called Keep A Child Alive, which provides life-saving drugs for AIDS sufferers in Africa.

Olavi Lanu’s ‘Reclining figure’ sculpture

Posted by hil

This is a dawn picture of one of my favourite sculptures in Canberra, on Ellery Crescent outside the School of Art. Its by a Finnish artist, Olavi Lanu, and was made in 1982.

You can see it enlarged and from a few different angles here.

At first I really did think it was group of real granite boulders that just happened to look like a person sleeping. I like imagining that rocks or mountains are slumbering spirits that sometimes might stretch and come alive to go about their business when no-one is about. Of course there are lots of stories along those lines; the ancient stone creature in Patricia Wrightson’s children’s book The Nargun and the Stars comes to mind.

But Lanu’s reclining figure is made from fibreglass resin, presumably on a wire form. Apparently it was originally covered with moss, but over the years lichens have taken over. There is another figure by Lanu not far away, but sitting among some trees.