floriade

Giant cross-section flower

Posted by hil

Cross-section flower

My third project for Floriade was making a giant model flower in cross-section, to be the central display in CSIRO’s Division of Plant Industry’s information tent. I really enjoyed making this, too. Some projects go really easily and this was one of those!

The petals were the main challenge, but I decided pretty quickly to use a molded felt technique that I had previously tried with some masks. Essentially you saturate felt in white PVA glue, mold it to the shape you want, and then let it dry. It adopts the shape and becomes fairly hard and plasticised in a way. You can paint it, too, and the way the paint bleeds through the felt can be used in different ways, some quite sensuous. In this case, I made a petal shape in clay and each petal had a double layer with some aluminium flat bar running up the middle to give it extra rigidity. The interesting thing about the technique apart from the obvious texture, is that the felt can be stretched and pulled but remain in one piece. In this respect natural wool felt is much better to work with because it pulls and moves much more than synthetic felt. But synthetic is okay if you don’t have a choice.

I think the flower may end up being displayed in the CSIRO Discovery Centre, where some of my insect models are too; I hope so.

Espresso coffee hats

Posted by hil

Espresso coffee hats

Making these fun hats was another of my Floriade projects. I enjoyed making them and was really happy with how they turned out. They were made for the performance group The Bunch of Posers, who in this guise are called Acappellacino.

To make them I started out by making the cup shape upside down, with a mixture of a garden pot and a garden hanging basket and clay. I started paper mache-ing it, but realised that the edges were going to curl when they dried, so instead I made a pattern from the shape (you put alfoil over it, masking tape it so it stays in the shape, then cut it into sections so
it becomes a 2D flat pattern). I could have made a small model and done the same and scaled it up if I hadn’t started down the paper mache track to begin with. Once I had the pattern, I cut it out of a particular thin dense type of foam sheeting and glued it up into the cup shape.

The top cup rim and the foam is made from a circle of polystyrene, so it gives the foam rigidity at the top. The saucer is slightly thicker foam, and the rim of the saucer is a ring of a kind of tubular insulation foam that the building trade uses (its called PEF backing rod, and its like those lengths of foam kids play with in swimming pools – pool noodles they are called here. But you can buy it in different diameters if you know where to go for building supplies.) The ring gave the saucer a nice rigidity. You can see the cups in the raw making phase in this picture.

Then it has muslin spray-glued on to the foam to give it a protective surface and kind of bring it all together. Then paint, with a bit of latex added to make it stick well.

The coffee pot was made in much the same way, just from foam. I made a pattern straight from my neighbour’s espresso pot and scaled it up (what I should have done with the cup, too!). However it does have a ring of light aluminium flat bar in the top rim and a couple of aluminium bars from the ring up into the lid to make the open lid possible and strong. The steam is dacron, the wadding stuff they put in quilts, with a wire through it.

The coffee cups just sit on your head like sombreros, but the coffee pot needed a chin stap which I filched from a bike helmet.

Here’s a video of the group in action, singing “You’re the Cream in my Coffee’. On my computer the sound only streams smoothly once its played through once.


(Click on the photo)

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.

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.

Floriade: Giant Lifesavers, Tyre Swans, Rainbow Serpents

Posted by hil

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

Posted by hil

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.