canberra

Floriade: Giant Lifesavers, Tyre Swans, Rainbow Serpents

bheads

Here are some pictures of a few other things that took my fancy at Floriade – I like the roving entertainment more than the massed European flowers.

There was a rainbow serpent swimming in Nerang Pool, designed and created by Aeon Mortimer. Its a big inflatable, and apparently it can spray a fine mist of water from its spines, creating rainbows in the air around it. Nice idea. Aeon’s puppet play The Great Big Story Book was also there. Designed as a giant pop-up book, it tells a version of the dreamtime story of Tiddalik the Frog, with puppet creatures stepping out of the pages of the book. (My favourite picture book version of Tiddalick is What Made Tiddalik Laugh by Joanna Troughton. It has lovely illustrations, and the kind of lame jokes that pre-schoolers love because they are so lame.)

I was also enjoyed catching up with Jigsaw‘s Flotsam and Jetsam, a one-woman show acted by Chrissie Shaw, and based on collected stories of children who lived on lighthouse islands in Australia. I particularly liked Mrs Ingram’s windswept dress that could be slipped into and out of in a flash.

Icarus Performance Troupe from Sydney were lots of fun, jogging about the gardens as giant muscle-bound lifesavers. They blew their whistles, bossed the crowds into swimming between the flags, and struck stong-man poses (complete with appropriate grunts and roars!) at the drop of a hat.

The flock of 100 black swans made from old rubber car tyres interested me not so much for what they were, but as a reflection on the fact that when they were common garden decorations in the 50’s and 60’s (or earlier) they were always painted white. I suppose they were part of that era’s acceptance of the idea of England as the home. As reported in the Canberra Times, the swans were made by Greg Hedger of Limestone Creek Enterprises:

‘Mr Hedger said each swan took about an hour to fashion – once he had the design sorted – plus a bit of time for painting. The tyres were heated by engine exhaust or in a glasshouse so the rubber was easier to cut and twist inside out.

The tyres were sourced from a company in Melbourne, which was believed to have held a stockpile for use as swings. While the steel belting in a modern radial tyre is good for motorists, it does not wear safely in children’s swingsets. Neither is it suitable for swan sculpting, because it’s too difficult to slice.

Sizes ranged from 12- and 13-inch car tyres to truck tyres. Mr Hedger’s offerings have been planted with a new variety of pansy, named Waterfall.

After the festival, Mr Hedger intends to take the swans under his wing. While the Floriade examples are under offer – Mr Hedger’s wife has her name on two – he’ll take up the slack afterwards. He’s already had orders from ladies in Burra and Orange and a school in Armidale. He had no idea what the swans would sell for, but would probably charge less than $100 apiece.’

There is an article about the traditional Australian art of sculpting swans from old tyres here.

Finally the Scarecrow Competition :-). I have a soft spot for the scarecrows because they come so much from the everyday community, and because such a wide interpretation of the concept of a scarecrow is acceptable. Here are some photographs of just a few of them that took my fancy:

Domestic Goddess (Woman of Steel, With Forked Tongue, Ready to Spring) by Barlin Event Hire
In Bega Everyones Dreaming of Rain, by Merimbulla Rudoplh Steiner School. The Bega Valley down on the south coast is dairy country, and must be feeling the drought as much as any of us.
French Frog by Telopea Park School. Appropriately, Telopea is a bi-lingual English/French public school.
Bunyip, by Hindmarsh Student Group (?)
Mermaid, by Braidwood Preschool Association. Their use of tin lids for scales is very effective, just as good as the CDs that many others used, for instance in the following one.
Fish, by Waniassa (?) Learning Support Unit
Refugees and Asylum Seekers don’t want a Red Carpet Welcome, by Amnesty International. I’d like to think they were prompted by my Howard last year.
Person in the Bath, by Radford College
Dragon, by the O’Connor Co-operative School. A long rhapsody in plastic!

Old Parliament House’s ‘Big Heads’ Puppets at Floriade

Floriade has been on for the last month in Canberra, and tomorrow is the last day. I went in last weekend hoping to see the Old Parliament House Big Heads. These are much-larger-than-life-sized body-suit puppets of parliamentarians from days gone by. Their usual home is Old Parliament House, which is now a parliamentary museum, where they stroll around bringing the past to life.

Last year I got photos of the original three Big Heads in the Scarecrow Drive at Floriade, having an encounter with The Fool Factory‘s alien, Solar Flare:

An altercation between Solar Flare and Andrew Fisher and Alfred Deakin.
Solar Flare and Andrew Fisher shake hands.
Sir Edmund Barton takes liberties with my John Howard Scarecrow

This year there are two new Big Heads, Doc Evatt and Bob Menzies. While they have been made by the same company, eRTH, these ones have a less stylised look about them, and are more realistically modelled on the historical figures they represent. I think they are really cool. I love the demeanor of Doc Evatt, and his brown suit is just right.

eRTH is a Sydney company that does innovative large-scale theatrical performances which include ‘giant puppets, huge inflatables, acrobatics, aerial and flying creatures, stilt-walking costumes and pyrotechnics’. I would have loved to see their Gargoyles clambering over the outside of buildings, or The Neds ranging through city streets. At Floriade this year, they were also present as the Waterheads, four people with their heads in tanks of coloured water, strolling through the beds of flowers.

Artlook: Canberra’s arts monthly revamped


Nice to see the first issue of Artlook, Canberra’s snazzy new free arts monthly, out in theatres and cafes. Artlook takes over from Muse, featuring interviews, reviews, and a calendar of gigs and exhibitions, all now in a glossy magazine format. It also has a full online version of the current issue. I wonder if the online will eventually take over from the print version?

‘The Lost Thing’ : Jigsaw Theatre Company Call for Actor/Puppeteers

Jigsaw Theatre Company, a Canberra-based, professional theatre company for young audiences established in 1974, is calling for 2 male actor puppeteers for their upcoming production of ‘The Lost Thing’. Based on the book by Shaun Tan, ‘The Lost Thing’ is premiering at the National Gallery of Australia, and is being developed with festival touring in mind.

Contact : Greg Lissaman (Artistic Director)
Tel: 02 62939900
Email: jigsawartistic@ozemail.com.au
Dates : Rehearsals: 6 Sept – 2 Oct 2004; Season: 5-9 Oct 2004
City : Canberra
Salary : $720/week + superannuation and holiday loading
Auditions : By arrangement with the Artistic Director
To express interest in these roles, please email headshots and bios to jigsawartistic@ozemail.com.au.

Ron Mueck’s Pregnant Woman sculpture

One of the recent acquisitions at the National Gallery of Australia here in Canberra is a larger-than-life sculpture of a naked pregnant woman by Ron Mueck. Its an extraordinary thing: 2.5 metres tall, and so life-like in its attention to the minutest detail and colouring that you are compelled to get up close to look, and then suddenly feel as if you have got way too personal. Then again the woman seems entirely in her own world, feeling the enormity of pregnancy in every way, and as if nothing else can impinge on those sensations.

The gallery is also showing a video of the making of Pregnant Woman, which was very interesting to me as a maker. The sculpture is made of fibre glass and silicon, and the video shows the elaborate processes of mold making and casting that was involved. I’m not sure if the video being offered for sale at the National Gallery, Trafalgar Square, London, is the same, but it looks from the description as if it might be. One technique that I thought might prove useful is that shellac can be painted on a clay sculpture to prevent it drying out.

Here are some links to some collections of Ron Mueck’s amazing work: again, the sculptures are all superbly realistic except for some twist involving scale:

Dead Dad from the BBC’s The Saatchi Phenomenon . The figure is less than life-size in death.
Artmolds.com. Numerous works.
ABC’s Gateway to Arts and Culture: 49th Venice Biennale: Ron Mueck’s ‘Boy’. This includes a RealVideo walkaround of ‘Boy’ shot by Pollyanna Sutton.
Boy. A couple of pictures.
James Cohen Galleries. Numerous works pictured, and a collection of articles and reviews in pdf files.

Howard statue update

Greg Taylor’s sculpture of John Howard that I blogged about in late February is apparently in storage at the moment until an unveiling at the National Folk Festival over the Easter weekend.

I’ve also found an ABC 666 page about the sculpture, which includes two pictures of the statue being removed from Reconcilliation Walk, and a couple of radio interviews with Greg Taylor at the time. The interesting thing about the second interview is that the joking talk about businesses having to ‘pay ransom’ to get the statue moved from their premises came back to haunt this last week. A local liberal MP claimed that ActewAGL, the company to first to host the statue outside their shopfront, had been blackmailed into making a donation. Both the sculptor and the CEO of ActewAGL dismissed the claims as ridiculous.

Van Gogh Hot Air Balloon

I love the hot air balloon festivals in Canberra, particularly the one on now, part of Canberra Week. Getting up and mooching around the balloons as they set up on the lawns at Old Parliament House at dawn is a lot easier in autumn than in the cold of winter when the other major balloon festival takes place. I remember when the ballooning festivals started here about 16 years ago. I was blown away by the magic of the things: their sheer size, how they looked like giant pregnant women lying on the grass; the dragon’s breath roar of the burners; and their silence in between times. I also love the special shaped balloons. Over the years the most memorable have been the birthday cake, the upside down balloon, the cow, the polar bear, the Swatch watch, the Freddo frog, and the kookaburra. Its wonderfully surreal to see these things just appear out of nowhere in the sky, or see them floating among the clouds or drifting across the lake.

On Saturday, I went to this year’s lauch of the balloon fiesta. I was especially interested in the Van Gogh balloon, which was appearing in the southern hemisphere for the first time. And it was magnificent! Its a three-dimensional balloon replica of Van Gogh’s painting, Self Portrait with Grey Felt Hat, and was made in 2003 for the 150th anniversary of Van Gogh’s birth. The face has the rather grim exacting expresssion and textured brushstroke look that it should.

Apparently the balloon was made by modelling a 3-D plaster cast of the head from a digital photo of the portrait. The original portrait is kept at the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam. Actually there are three self portraits in grey felt hats, two in dark felt hats, seven in straw hats and two in caps – obviously he was a man who liked hats! But I imagine it is this portrait that the balloon was modelled on. The brush strokes were copied onto the model on the areas of the head that were not in the painting, and then transferred onto more than 1000 pieces of balloon cloth. This was done with a computer-directed laser printer. Up close to the balloon you can see the cloth has a definite digital print appearance, but that is lost quickly as you step away.

The other special shape balloons this year are a frog (also from the Nederlands), a bunch of balloons, an Aussie Rules football, and the Liberty House (with two cats on its roof). The advertisment for tyres on the football flapped a little at one corner, gradually came loose all down one side, and then shimmered gracefully to the ground, even before the balloon took to the sky. Which was probably a good thing if it was going to fall off somewhere.

Many of the special shape balloons in the world, including the Van Gogh, are made by Cameron’s Balloons in Bristol, UK. According to the Wikipaedia entry, Don Cameron started making balloons in 1971 in his basement, and they now make about 500 a year. You can take a virtual tour around their factory here. Camerons also make airships! And they made the Breitling Orbiter balloon that made aviation history by flying round the world in 1999. There is a model kit of the orbiter, if you fancy such things.

One of the balloonists I chatted to was telling me that Kavanagh balloons are the only manufacturers of hot air balloons in Australia. She had a Kavanagh balloon (and immediately I noticed others), and was visting from Mildura where the The Nudie 16th World Hot Air Balloon Championship is going to be staged from the 26 June – 3 July 2004. With over 80 competitors from around the world already signed up, it sounds exciting.

John Howard Statue: ‘If the Boots Don’t Fit’

On Saturday Feb 7th the Melbourne sculptor Greg Taylor erected this fine life-size bronze sculpture of the Prime Minister, John Howard, in Reconcilliaton Walk in front of Old Parliament House in Canberra.

Called ‘If the Boots Don’t Fit’, it is reminiscent of all those noble-looking statues at ANZAC memorials across the country, but a wonderfully stunted one: the boots are like Goofy’s, the uniform baggy and oversized, the rifle held back to front and the hat worn with the wrong side up. Add in the droopy-shouldered stance and the self-satisfied expression and you have fine satire. Taylor says his artwork is intended to draw attention to Mr Howard’s “smallness” in a metaphysical, spiritual and political sense.

Unfortunately, the National Capital Authority removed it promptly the next day. And ever since, events surrounding the statue have just kept bubbling along in a very entertaining manner.

On the following Thursday, the Canberra Times reported that the statue had been found ‘behind barbed wire’, in an NCA ‘detention camp’: a storage compound in Commonwealth Park. That day Taylor was allowed to hire a crane to lift the one-tonne statue out, and by then our electricity and water company, ActewAGL, had offered to pay $2000 to charity if they could exhibit it outside their shopfront in Garema Place in the city for a few days. Click on the thumbnails below to view images.

Since then:

Jon Stanhope, the Chief Minister of the ACT, has said he would like the ACT to buy the statue so that even if Howard won’t live here himself, at least the statue will have a permanent home here. That is causing consternation in some quarters! Some people have suggested the people of Canberra would be willing to subscribe to a fund to buy it if that plan falls through. Meanwhile, the head of ActewAGL apologized if they had offended anyone, saying exhibiting the statue was only intended to be a bit of fun.

The letters to the editor have been vitriolic and amusing on both sides.

The Sunday Canberra Times editorialized about the value of satire, and surmised that Howard himself might have preferred the statue to be allowed to stand in the first place.

Geoff Pryor, our cartoonist, had some fun with it all.

The art critic Sacha Grishan reviewed the work and concluded that the only reason it did not fit the bill as artwork that the ACT might purchase was that it had not been commissioned.

The NCA is considering charging Taylor $850 for the removal and ‘storage’.

There were rowdy scenes in a Senate Estimates Committee when the Territories Minister expressed outrage at having his Sunday afternoon interupted by the NCA advising him of the statues removal. Also, “Senator Heffernan asked what would happen if ‘every second yobo’ wanted to erect effigies on Commonwealth land in future. ACT Senator Kate Lundy suggested the NCA could erect big fences around any open space.” ;-P.

The statue has spent last week outside the Hawker Butchery, and a sausage sizzle was held in its honour, with donations going to the charity Koomari. Tomorrow it apparently moves on to be on show outside the Kingston Hotel.

Stay tuned, folks… And thanks, Greg!

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Chiao Wan Jan Children Hand Puppet Troupe

taiwan.jpgIn Canberra we have enjoyed the annual National Multicultural Festival over the last couple of weeks. For many people its an opportunity to relax in the late summer weather, sample a myriad of different foods from the stalls lining Garema Place, and see performances from other cultures. The Chiao Wan Jan Children Hand Puppet Troupe from Taiwan was visiting from the 11th – 13th, and I caught their last performance at Glebe Park last Sunday morning. The troupe was founded in 1988 in the Ping-Den Elementary School in Taiwan, and the puppeteers are children aged 9 to 11, who learn the traditional hand puppet theatre as an elective at the school.

Before the show I was able to meet some of the kids and their teachers, who were kind enough to show me their puppets, traditonal characters such as the Monkey King and the Dragon King of the Sea. I particularly liked the ones that held weapons or fans in one hand. They were attached inside with a spring to a rod, and when you turned the rod the puppet would swing the sword or stick. At the begining of the show, The Raiding of the Crystal Palace (from the Journey to the West) the musicians told us about their instruments, and the puppeteers showed us several tricks their puppets could do. This included running by swinging the weighted feet, and twirling, jumping and summersaulting from hand to hand! There were some great fight scenes in the play, with wild kicks and leaps; comedy; a lovely scene where a crane is grooming a dragon; and a great use of the various ‘windows’ in the booth theatre. If you get a chance to see Chiao Wan Jan Children Hand Puppet Troupe, don’t miss it!