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?
Canberra 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.
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.
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!
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.
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?
As I mentioned previously, Greg Taylor’s satirical John Howard statue was to have a showing at the National Folk Festival. The Green Left Weekly Online has a report and picture of the statue standing festooned amid a Field of Hearts that were made in support of refugees.
According to Art Almanac, Maitland Regional Gallery is showing Taylor’s statue from May 7 to June 7 in its first officially sanctioned exhibition.
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.
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.
