One year off.

Open residency project
Ocular Lab
West Brunswick

WEEK FOUR

Open residency project
Ocular Lab
West Brunswick

WEEK THREE

NOTES.

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Riding week two’s collected toilet and organic material back to the compost site on Thea’s bike as honey-wagon. Weeding the overgrown house garden and feeding it to the heap, enjoying time in the sun and air outside in this grassy meadow.

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Leafing through the collection of publications and files on the shelf in the passage outside the kitchen. Paying attention to Ocular Lab’s self-description statements (from publications in 2005 & 2007), and noticing the shifts in inflection from writer to writer. Thinking of peripheral details - that the shopfront was formerly a milk bar, run by Mrs Vignoli, who still lives in the house adjoining. That the room was used as a private artists studio, before it shifted back to a public space as a gallery. That Ocular Lab is nearing its end and will return to being a private studio after March next year.

From 2003-2006 a record of projects at the Lab was kept in file folders, including exhibition details, images and statements. In the back catalogue I notice an image of the rectangle stripped in the paint by Julie Davies to show a small screen in the Pearson St window. And an image showing the former gallery signage and street number on the glass over the doorway.

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Continuing to strip the paint from the windows, this week using a fragrant citrus based product. Noticing the traces of the former Lab window interventions I’ve been told about - the 5cm frame cut all around the edge of each pane by Bill Seeto, a 20 cent coin sized periscope hole by Sean Loughrey and the rectangle to reveal a screen by Julie Davies. Finding layers of colour beneath the white, including red and black used in previous shows by Alex Rizkalla. Steadily obliterating this material record.

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Picking some of the bottle-brushes that were in a blaze all along Pearson and Albert St’s. Aware that the colour red has been waving at me like a flag here - red blankets, a red rose, red rubber gloves, red everywhere.

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The progress of clover, indoors and out.

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By week three I’d become attuned to the sound of the postie’s motorbike approaching around the same time each afternoon. One day I stood in the doorway, thinking to record his passing as a blur of fluorescent orange. But he stopped - for me!

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A card from my friend Lucy, with news of her garden and our workplace. The arrival of post, personally addressed and received, was pleasing testament to my being “in residence”.

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Eating lunch in the streetscape. On the rock, on the footpath.

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The rose’s progress.

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As the view to the street from within the Lab became wider, I started to enjoy the corner panorama effect. Particularly the unwieldy passage of large trucks around, or over, the roundabout. Noticing again, from the conversation with Alex, how the roundabout is designed to be mounted by the supermarket trucks on their way to Sydney Rd. And the way that sometimes, as with this one, a truck would pass by in one direction and back in the other soon after - completing the turn in two stages.

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Noticing how many roses are planted in the front gardens of Brunswick. Taking note of blooms and two street names on my route home from the Lab.

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Wiping down the handbasin and putting out soap. Cleaning the loo. Doing the dishes.

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Taping up printouts of the blog notes on the red panel in the hallway, where they catch passing air.

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Preparing the room and table with Sandie for the Friday night dinner and talk. Friends and Lab members arrive in the last of the day’s light. I introduce my practice and THE LAB via a project from this time last year, THE__HALL. Dips and bread by Julie, a tomato soup with pasta, rosemary and lemon by Sandie, and Lebanese pastries and fruit from Sydney Rd. With a red slide, the data projector became a room softening light source, along with household lamps brought in by Kylie and Bianca. Blankets became a bed for a cold body needing rest.

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Arriving on Saturday and noticing balloons tied to the telegraph pole on the corner with a handmade garage sale sign. The ways people draw attention in the streetscape. The day was windy, and their movement against the pole an echo of the flutterings Thea had been observing in Sydney. Midway through a conversation that day I looked and noticed the red balloon had popped. By the end of the day, both had.

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Noting the light shape cast by the building facade from three different vantage points - standing on Mrs Vignoli’s front fence, on the rock and in the tree.

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Making a day bed for my own tired body.

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Receiving visitors, like Lauren, author of She Sees Red. We pass an hour or two sitting, drinking tea and chatting - about how we know our mutual friend Lucas, our mutual compulsion to document and how to find restraint and balance and the Melbourne Laneways project, which sparks a rambly musing on light. I’m keen to see Geoff Robinson’s current laneway project that reflects and reorients sunlight. Lauren connects this to the ray of light designed to beam into Melbourne’s Shrine of Remembrance at exactly 11:00am on the eleventh day of the eleventh month - or 12 midday these days, thanks to daylight savings. I wonder if that is in effect an oculus, and think back to my experience of the Pantheon in Rome. We continue on the daylight savings theme, likening it to a kind of time warping and pondering the repeated referendums held in WA and QLD that have returned a resounding “NO” to its institution in those states. We try to think of the reasons why - agricultural we figure - and find they’re a little beyond our inner-city, coastal frames of reference.

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Sightings of fellow field workers. A young woman shooting video of the roundabout, and then seeming to follow a bird hopping along the road - which she caught, wrapped up and carried away. Soon after, a young man standing on the roundabout, waiting for something or someone and checking his phone.

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Sun signs.

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Sitting on the rock and looking up. Registering the grid of power lines and their intersection with the facade.

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Heightened layering of vision and reflection in the Lab windows.

READING:

FIELDWORK
Edited and Co-Produced by Jacob Bee, Ronald Boer, Valerie Dempsey, Erin Gleason, Florian Graf, Naomi Hennig, Melissa MacRobert, Julia Martin and Christine Wylie.
Consulting editor Dr. Clementine Deliss
Published by A/S/N Mutual Press, 2009

from
THE COLLECTIVE MEMORY OF A PROGRAMME
Eelco Hootfman

‘A/S/N
When you are given a brief as a landscape architect, how do you engage with it in terms of fieldwork?

EH
Being a landscape architect is completely intertwined with the idea of having a site. I like the term field, because it’s neutral. It doesn’t have a particular dimension attached to it. As an entity, field seems to indicate a boundary around a set of operations, otherwise where would it start, where would it stop? Fieldwork is not a word I would normally use. I would probably refer to site analysis. For a landscape architect, regardless of the style you proclaim, the most important issue is that the product comes out of a particular place. I don’t think I would ever just take a product to a place. Some artists do, so that’s not a criticism. The Land Art movement got out of the gallery in that way and some of the best writings on the subject are by Robert Smithson. He had inspirational ways of seeing a landscape. Whenever I go for a job interview, I visit the site first. The site is where it all starts. That is our ethos.’

p.27

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At the end of a long day stripping windows and no visitors, two people from the most consistent artist-run initiative visitor demographic dropped in - fellow artists with upcoming shows at the gallery.
They’d presumed that no one would be there, and as I tidied up and prepared to leave I could hear plans being made to black out the space and the question: “So what do you do about lighting?”. “…Spots…”

RESOURCES

Humble Pile, a nutrient recovery project by Nance Klehm
The Humanure Handbook by Joseph Jenkins

WITH THANKS

To my many hosts and helpers…Sandra Bridie, Tom Nicholson, Clare Land, Julie Davies, Alex Rizkalla, Ocular Lab, Thea Rechner, Lucas Ihlein, Josie Cavallaro, Anne Kay, Bianca Hester, Kylie Wilkinson, John Najjar Furniture Forever.

Open residency project
Ocular Lab
West Brunswick

WEEK TWO

NOTES.

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Clover seeds pushing up through soil and sprouting.

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The red rose Bianca brought on my first day, opening and changing.

READING:

The Mind of Clover
Essays in Zen Buddhist Ethics

Robert Aitken
North Point Press, 1984

‘You and I come forth as possibilities of essential nature, alone and independent as stars, yet reflecting and being reflected by all things. My life and yours are the unfolding realization of total aloneness and total intimacy. The self is completely autonomous, yet exists only in resonance with all other selves.’

p.13

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Finishing the curtain for the humanure loo, offering a breezy nod to modesty and a counterpoint to the boxy confines of the flushing toilet. The organic waste from week one at the Lab combined with bucket contents and biked back to the heap site.

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Handmade signs on Union St and a great example of computer-free font making, which I’d been thinking about.

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This week was extraordinarily cold, with frequent heavy downpours. The roof started leaking in correspondence with the stains and shapes on the floor. Observing where water enters the room under heavy rain, catching the two major drips in glasses. This proved useful when the builder who’s been engaged to repair the ceiling wandered in to sight the job, asking where the main leaks were. Water drawing on the floor as it finds the lowest level.

READING:

The Humanure Handbook: a guide to composting human manure
Joseph Jenkins
2005, 3rd edition

‘Feces and urine are examples of natural, beneficial, organic materials excreted by the bodies of animals after completing their digestive processes. They are only “waste” when we discard them. When recycled, they are resources, and are often referred to as manures, but never as waste, by the people who do the recycling.

We do not recycle waste. It’s a common semantic error to say that waste is, can be, or should be recycled. Resource materials are recycled, but waste is never recycled. That’s why it’s called “waste”. Waste is any material that is discarded and has no further use. We humans have been so wasteful for so long that the concept of waste elimination is foreign to us. Yet, it is an important concept.

When a potato is peeled, the peels aren’t kitchen waste - they’re still potato peels. When they’re collected for composting, they are being recycled and no waste is produced.

Composting professionals sometimes refer to recycled materials as “waste”. Many of the people who are developing municipal composting programs came from the waste management field, a field in which refuse has always been termed “waste”. Today, however, the use of the term “waste” to describe recycled materials is an unpleasant semantic habit that must be abandoned.’

pp. 7-8

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Elaborating on an existing Lab sign with the gallery’s red dot stickers.

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Two days in a row the postie stuck his head in to ask me what number the Lab was, 31 or 33? Improvising a street number with stickers over the doorway to make it clear.

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Walking in the laneways around the second site to find materials for the walls of the humanure compost heap. Finding a sunny discreet spot, clearing ground, rigging it up and laying down the first layers of kitchen scraps and bucket contents with surplus straw and weeds from Kylie’s brain garden.

READING:

The Humanure Handbook: a guide to composting human manure
Joseph Jenkins
2005, 3rd edition

‘Shortly after I published the first edition of this book, I was invited to speak to a group of nuns at a convent… It was Earth Day, 1995. The presentation went well. After I spoke, the group showed slides of their gardens and compost piles, then we toured their compost area and poked around in the worm boxes. A delightful lunch followed, during which I asked them why they were interested in humanure, of all things.

“We are the Sisters of Humility,” they responded. “The words ‘humble’ and ‘humus’ come from the same semantic root, which means ‘earth’. We also think these words are related to the word ‘human’. Therefore, as part of our vow of humility, we work with the earth. We make compost, as you’ve seen. And now we want to learn to make compost from our toilet material.”…This was deep shit. Profound.

A light bulb went off in my head. Of course, composting is an act of humility… The exercising of the human spirit can take many forms, and the simple act of cleaning up after oneself is one of them.’

pp. 69-70

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My key to the Lab must be a copy of countless generations of copies, and it continued to be tricky to get the door open as I arrived each day. Sometimes it took ten minutes of jiggling, jostling, rising frustration and absurdity. Until Alex dropped in one day and demonstrated the knack of downward pressure on the lower edge and I got the feel for it.

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Starting the process of stripping the paint from the Pearson and Albert St window panes. Finding a rhythm of applying stripper, scraping, sweeping and cleaning each day. Working with care on the Albert St window and sensitive to the movement of the glass due to the deteriorated upper timber brace. Realising I’ve been trusted to work with the window when it’s a bit risky to do so. Thinking about who cleans and cares for spaces like these, and the work by Julie Davies a few people have mentioned to me, in which she documented artists de-installing their work at the Lab and returning the room to the condition they found it.

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Thinking about the repertoire of tools and kitchen things and cleaning products common to artist-run initiatives - what’s required to maintain a room and the bodies that occupy it.

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The nearest living things - a banksia and piece of bush rock in the Pearson St verge planting, and the eucalypt gracing the centre of the roundabout. Standing in the street chatting to Alex about the history of car racing and accidents on the street, roundabout and verge design, we came to notice that the tree is crowned with red blossoms and just on the brink of flowering.

READING:

How to Cook Your Life
From the Zen Kitchen to Enlightenment

Zen Master Dogen and Kosho Uchiyama Roshi
Translated by Thomas Wright
Shambhala, 2005

‘It is written in the Chanyuan Qinggui that “the function of the tenzo is to manage meals for the monks”…

I shall now take up the work of the tenzo covering a period of one complete day. After the noon meal the tenzo should go to the tsusu and kansu to get the rice, vegetables and other ingredients for the following morning and noon meals. Once he has these, he must handle them as carefully as if they were his own eyes. Renyong of Baoneng said, “Use the property and possessions of the community as carefully as if they were your own eyes.” ‘

pp. 3-4

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Observing the piles of mostly unopened mail gathering here and there around the Lab. Mindful of the habit of galleries to send their printed invites and programs to other galleries, and that in this instance they go unreceived. The Lab has no noticeboard or space provided for ephemera, and a whole lot of postage and colour printing lingers then goes straight into the recycling.

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Arriving on Saturday, a real estate agent showing a house on Albert St had placed a snappy ‘Open’ sign on the corner opposite the Lab. As I played with moving the sign and pointing it towards the gallery, a car promptly pulled up. By the time the woman reached me, she thought to ask if I was an artist taking a photo of the sign, or was this property open? Because she was looking to buy a shopfront. I explained I was mucking around with the sign, and was open, but she turned straight back to her car a little crossly, saying that it was a “little bit deceptive”. Not long after a friendly young agent in an enormous Audi pulled up and collected the sign. Two more houses were open for viewing on the street over the weekend, and attention drawn with red flags and signs placed prominently on the roundabout.

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Archetypal ARI note on the door when I need to duck out.

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A first glimpse of the milky layered vision created by heightened reflections on the window glass as I strip it. Seeing through, behind and beyond the room, its contents and surrounds.

RESOURCES

Humble Pile, a nutrient recovery project by Nance Klehm
The Humanure Handbook by Joseph Jenkins

WITH THANKS

To my many hosts and helpers…Sandra Bridie, Tom Nicholson, Clare Land, Julie Davies, Alex Rizkalla, Ocular Lab, Thea Rechner, Lucas Ihlein, Josie Cavallaro, Anne Kay, Bianca Hester, Kylie Wilkinson, John Najjar Furniture Forever.

Open residency project
Ocular Lab
West Brunswick

WEEK ONE

NOTES.

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For the first week it felt right to observe things as they were in the Lab. The given conditions, the objects in the room when I arrived - a plinth, a ladder, a trestle table, an amplifier and some foam - and the movement of light and air into and through the space. It was surprising how much was going on in and at the edges of an empty room. I felt no need to remove the objects, figuring I’d wait to see who had left them and what they might be useful for. For the first few days I was strongly mindful of the practices of Thea Rechner and John Borley, as I paid attention to air and light and sat on the front step with the doors open making eye contact with passing drivers.

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Documenting the Lab’s internal texts and documents - a child’s drawing in the kitchen, handwritten notes charting the building’s plumbing problems, and a longstanding appeal to go elsewhere on the toilet door.

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Scouring the Sydney Rd op shops for blankets, cushions and tea provisions, creating a warm and comfortable spot to sit, read and write.

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On the first day I planted seeds of the green manure Red Clover (Trifolium pratense) into potting mix in three pots, using gallery ashtrays as saucers and positioning them on the plinth by the best available light into the room. Continually re-positioning the pots became a device for observing and tracking sunlight where it enters and skirts the perimeter of the building.

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Coming early to see the effect of direct light on the east facing Pearson St window. Considering shifting the ‘opening hours’ to the morning at some stage, to take advantage of the direct light and warmth.

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Propping the doors open to differing degrees with available objects.

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READING:

The Humanure Handbook: a guide to composting human manure
Joseph Jenkins
3rd edition

‘DO’S AND DON’TS OF A THERMOPHILIC TOILET COMPOSTING SYSTEM

DO - Collect urine, feces, and toilet paper in the same receptacle. Urine provides essential moisture and nitrogen.
DO - Keep a supply of clean, organic cover material handy to the toilet at all times. Rotting sawdust, peat moss, leaf mould, and other such cover materials prevent odor, absorb excess moisture and balance the C/N ratio.
DO - Deposit humanure into a depression in the top center of the compost pile, not around edges.
DO - Keep the top of the compost pile somewhat flat. This allows the compost pile to absorb rainwater, and makes it easy to cover fresh material added to the pile.

DON’T- Turn the compost pile if it is being continuously added to and a batch is not available. Allow the active thermophilic layer in the upper part of the pile to remain undisturbed.
DON’T - Expect thermophilic activity until a sufficient mass has accumulated.
DON’T - Use the compost before it has fully aged. This means one year after the pile has been constructed, or two years if the humanure originated from a diseased population.
DON’T - Worry about your compost. If it does not heat to your satisfaction, let it age for a prolonged period, then use it for horticultural purposes.’

p.170

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The main surprise in the room was to notice the beautiful movement of light across the walls as it gets reflected by the windows of passing cars through the viewing strips cut by Mark Shorter into the Lab’s two window panes. The movement in this footage becomes a register of my breathing.

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Taking in the view out, from front and back, and watching and listening to the significant volume of passing traffic. The motion of cars, bikes and trucks around the roundabout, the thump of approaching joggers and chats with the landlady, Mrs Vignoli, when she passes by.

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Organising waste collection - rubbish, organic and rubbery water from the hot water bottle.

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At the very moment the space was due to be officially ‘open’, I found myself locked out. Given my interest in exploring ways to open the space, its sudden impenetrability was funny and curious. Lab members came, Bianca strategised, various implements were collected and tried and Harry, a passing builder, stopped to help us force entry and repair the damage.

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Inhabiting the streetfront and footpath, where direct sun falls in the afternoon and bodies gravitate.

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A substitute humanure compost toilet assembled and operational. Situated in back area next to the out of order flushing toilet, using a fragrant cypress sawdust from timbers salvaged from the Black Saturday bushfires.

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Opening the Lab with existing signage and open doors.

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On Sunday an amazing double, verging on triple, rainbow. Ending the week with a reminder of Thea, our synchronicities and changed places - Sydney and Melbourne.

RESOURCES

Humble Pile, a nutrient recovery project by Nance Klehm
The Humanure Handbook by Joseph Jenkins

WITH THANKS

To my many hosts and helpers…Sandra Bridie, Tom Nicholson, Clare Land, Julie Davies, Alex Rizkalla, Ocular Lab, Thea Rechner, Lucas Ihlein, Josie Cavallaro, Anne Kay, Bianca Hester, Kylie Wilkinson, John Najjar Furniture Forever.

THE LAB

For the month of October Lisa Kelly will be developing an open residency project at Ocular Lab, Brunswick West, Melbourne. Less an exhibition than a set of actions, processes, reading and renewal, THE LAB will draw on the Lab’s past use as a private artists studio and observe its shift to a public gallery. Combining the dual purposes of work and presentation space while being attentive to the specific conditions of the site, Kelly will engage in simple process cycles that annex the basic functions of a public venue. Areas of exploration will include onsite waste, streetfront visibility and natural lighting.

This project for Ocular Lab continues the artist’s practice of using critical frameworks to investigate the institutions her work is hosted by. In 2008 her project THE__HALL explored the re-purposing of a community hall into an art gallery by a local council.

Ocular Lab
31 Pearson Street
Brunswick West
VIC

Open & in progress:
Wednesday to Sunday 1pm-5pm
10th October to 1st November.

Closing gathering:
Saturday 31st October 3-5pm

Fresh flower & garden corsage making
workshop with Tonia Gatt

Cut + Paste
Sustainable Craft Festival and Makers Market
11-13 September at The Red Rattler

some photos thanks to Hello Sandwich!

recent reading:

Life Work
Jan Verwoert

‘Working in the field of art makes it very difficult to draw a line between a professional and private life. What’s the best way forward? Life, to start with, is not just about your professional life. There is so much more to it than just work. The trouble is that, when you get into art, that ‘so much more’ is precisely what you want your work to be about. Life is what you want to immerse yourself in through your work. The freedom of the artist and intellectual, Theodor Adorno wrote, lies in the possibility of not having to separate work from pleasure as all those caught up in the system of division of labour do.1 This is our chance for a good life…’

published in Frieze magazine, Issue 121, March 2009
read the full article here

BEING
THERE.

One Day Sculpture: An International Symposium on Art, Time and Place
26th-28th March 2009
Wellington, Aotearoa New Zealand

In the late summer I was fortunate to be able to combine a visit to a friend on New Zealand’s Kapiti Coast with attendance of the One Day Sculpture symposium in Wellington. Conceived by the Litmus Research Initiative within the Massey University School of Fine Arts and creatively directed by UK-based curator Claire Doherty, the One Day Sculpture project was a one-year program of twenty temporal public works by local and international contemporary artists staged across the North and South islands. Lasting more or less twenty four hours each, the projects were realised Cuckoo-style (1), commissioned in partnership with a suite of institutions including museums, public and artist-run galleries and thereby nesting into a wide range of organisational resources. Instrumental to the accompanying discursive program - together with public discussions, responsive critical texts and a rich website of documentation and recommended reading - the symposium was held over two days at the Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa. It featured a dynamic range of local, regional and international critics, academics, curators and practitioners and was timed to coincide with the presentation of two of the One Day Sculpture projects in Wellington.

I’d been drawn to attend by the dynamic structure of parallel session streams - academic papers, close text readings and project case studies, bracketed by keynote and positioning papers and panel discussions - from which delegates could fashion their own symposium experience according to their leanings. Mine were toward the strong foregrounding of practitioner voices via the project case study sessions with One Day Sculpture participating artists. This composite structure suggested a malleability running counter to my prior experience of contemporary arts forums - though this was the first time I’d been at a symposium as a delegate, not before having been able to afford the cost of registration fees or loss of paid work time. Conferences and symposia tend to privilege arts industry professionals over producers, being typically staged on weekdays, when institutions can despatch their employees to attend in work time in continuance with paid work duties. Showing up on my own money and my own terms, my experience of the symposium was of an abundant, stimulating but ultimately overwhelming program that left me musing on some reverberating motifs of expectation, interjection and locality. And the distinct gaps between situated and secondary viewing and the specialised research community of contemporary art and the real live world.

Arriving in Wellington the day before the first symposium event allowed time to meet the city (in all its cultural kinship to Melbourne), some of the galleries (including Enjoy and the singular Peter McLeavey Gallery) and do some erratically situated reading of my close reading session text in the local backpackers and cafes. Prefaced by an extended powhiri, the poignant Maori welcome that ceremonialises the coming together of guests and hosts, the opening event was a keynote address by British architectural theorist and art critic Jane Rendell. Titled (The Re-Assertion of Time Into ) Critical Spatial Practice it charted a course between Rendell’s published research on spatial thinking and sited practice (2) and the expanded temporal implications posed by the One Day Sculpture project model - particularly ‘what occurs when time comes to the fore, rather than space’ (3). To enable attendance by the public as well as delegates, the evening event had been separately ticketed. In the first of a sequence of interjections, as soon as Rendell finished her presentation someone loudly announced, “Well I want my money back! And I consider myself critical!” Claire Doherty swiftly patched the puncture to the reverent atmosphere of the lecture theatre in segue to a responsive dialogue with Rendell.

Not unlike this person, I had been (more quietly) running up against my expectations and actual experience of what I’d come along to that night. In my case, it was the anticipation of more aerated than academic approaches to presentation and of vividly contemporary and localised artwork - neither of which resounded in Rendell’s delivered paper largely illustrated with well exposed European exemplars. In their banter style unpacking of key ideas around One Day Sculpture, Doherty and Rendell went on to flag some useful points with which to reflect on the project at large. Likening its structural form to that of a constellation, in which each work was both linked and discrete spatially and temporally, Rendell suggested that the understanding of these projects by their traces was a valid mode of witnessing. While referring largely to the documentation and critical writing around already staged projects, this notion was well cued to the here and now by an image in her presentation of what remained at the site of Heather & Ivan Morison’s Journée des barricades held in December 2008 in Wellington - a scrap of metal squished into Stout St. Paying a visit and some attention to a former site made a neat counterpoint to Rendell’s acknowledged distance from the One Day Sculpture project as she’d been experiencing it via the website on the other side of the world. A distance she described as being prolonged rather than collapsed, thanks to the opposite time zone and season, despite now being in New Zealand. The questions of distance, presence and the multiple means of ‘witnessing’ the One Day Sculpture events were well synthesised in Doherty’s reflection, ‘Where is the present tense of these projects?’ Any ripple in the present tense of the opening event care of the unhappy customer was well smoothed over by the time of post-keynote refreshments. As delegates from across the country made their greetings and social alignments and visitors negotiated meetings aided by name badges, the standard art world relational model of standing around with drinks found its familiar feet.

After a positioning paper by visiting Irish academic and artist Mick Wilson, my chosen morning parallel session on day one of the symposium program was the project case studies with One Day Sculpture artists Kah Bee Chow (NZ) and Bik Van der Pol (NL), moderated by local curator Paula Booker. With Kah Bee Chow’s Golden Slumbers event having taken place in Wellington back in August 2008 and Bik Van der Pol’s 1440 Minutes Towards the Development of a Site yet to be realised in Auckland in April, the symposium had occasioned a moment of temporal flux - from retrospection to potential projection. Right then and there, Chow had an air of the mild queasiness that artists can feel looking back at past work. Her presentation outlined the research process and components of an event work staged in memorial to Joe Kum Yung, the hapless victim of a 1915 race murder on Haining St in Wellington’s former Chinatown. Weaving the past and present use of the last remaining Chinatown era building she’d negotiated use of, Chow’s twelve hour event comprised a memorial garden, soup kitchen and video interviews about urban change on Haining St under an elaborate golden marquee - signifying the gold that had first attracted Chinese migrants to New Zealand. While all these discrete elements made clear sense in terms of the given research, Chow expressed uneasiness that the sum of its parts be ascribed to the genre of relational aesthetics. While it’s gracious for an artist to allow access to uncertainty, the implied sentiment of revision suggested this as an instance of the temporality of the One Day Sculpture project & symposium re-working the edges of completion and public understanding of an artwork. For both the public and producer. In the second part of the session the collaborative duo Bik Van der Pol opted not to forecast their forthcoming project - citing verbalising a work-in-progress as a complicating exercise they’d prefer to avoid - instead giving a useful introduction to their practice through documentation and publications from two prior projects.

In the afternoon of day one I took part in a close reading of the article Four Stages of Public Art by Mark Hutchinson (4) led by Mick Wilson and Claire Doherty. Hutchinson’s text deploys philosopher Roy Baskar’s four-part model of transformation to determine four distinct stages or modes at play within public art. The first is constituted by the unthinking imposition by an artist of their artwork onto a public, and the second marked by an artist opening into awareness of the impact and relationship between artwork, context and audience. In the third stage a genuine dialogue between the public artist and their intended public is able to take place, while the fourth constitutes a transformation of what public art could even be - ‘Art would be an art that changes what art is’ (5). Hutchinson’s suggestion is that the four moments don’t occur chronologically or exclusively within a public artwork, but might be observed in operation at any given stage of its realisation.

Wilson and Doherty positioned Hutchinson’s text as an introduction and tool with which to consider the suite of One Day Sculpture projects. Throughout the session discussion of the text was cued to projected images of a number of projects, including local artist Liz Allan’s Came a Hot Sundae: A Ronald Hugh Morrieson Festival. This was the work that I’d been most looking forward to attending a project case study with the artist, and was disappointed to learn Allan was ultimately unable to attend the symposium. Came a Hot Sundae was a one-day festival staged in the township of Hawera in South Taranaki, birthplace and lifelong residence of author and musician Ronald Hugh Morrieson (1922-1972). Conceived by Allan as a commemoration of Morrieson’s work, the festival included music performances in local venues, screenings of the 1980’s film adaptations of Morrieson’s novels and readings of his work by various civic figures at sites including the Kentucky Fried Chicken outlet that mushroomed on the spot of Morrieson’s family home after its demolition in 1992. That this demolition went ahead, after a small and unsuccessful protest effort, has been understood as means of ‘collective vengeance’ (6). Hawera was not proud of Morrieson, for his writing or unorthodox lifestyle. I was reading The Scarecrow on this trip and could appreciate why. The dark and startling perversity, hilarious vernacular and unflinching portrait of the poverty and parochialism of life in small town New Zealand that was characteristic to his novels fed a local resentment that persists to this day.

This knowledge of the Came a Hot Sundae project, derived only from online resources, combined with the reading of Four Stages of Public Art effected an uncomfortable about turn in my opinion of this work from enthusiasm to scepticism. The project’s critical respondent Patrick Laviolette labelled it an ‘interventionist festival’ (7), and the unlikelihood of the Hawera community celebrating the difficult figure of Morrieson of their own accord left me wondering if it wasn’t a fair example of Hutchinson’s first or second stage public art. While I knew that Allan had been on residency in the area during the project’s preparation, I was more acutely aware that this sway of mind had been occasioned by the mechanisms of the symposium, documentation and various framing voices (critics & curators), rather than a direct experience of the artwork or the reflections of the artist.

In itself this close reading session never quite transcended the nervous dynamic of an undergrad tutorial. Hampered perhaps by the overbearing arrangement of ringed tables that had Doherty and Wilson positioned at some distance at the front of the formation. Numerous empty chairs amplified the sensation of the gathering lacking quorum. Following the afternoon parallel sessions was a panel discussion with local curators Jon Bywater and Rob Garrett, Blair French (Australia) and Claire Doherty, debating what forms of curating best support emerging forms of contemporary art. After a whole day indoors behind closed blinds and drawn curtains my mood was veering. At the close of the panel we were despatched to view that day’s One Day Sculpture, Camouflaged Building by Slovakian artist Roman Ondàk. A number of us walked from Te Papa around the harbour front, in turbulent fresh air under a phenomenal late-day cloud streaky sky. Cutting into the city streets we met with the full effect of Wellington’s famous WIND. Experiencing an element as a pure and unapologetic force, that made walking such a significant effort you could only laugh, was a back to the body sense refresher. Battling to the Old Government Building, the site of Ondàk’s project, we looked for our visual tip-off’s and found them in the small piles of sawdust heaped against the base of the building, in corners and doorways all around its perimeter. Somehow evading dispersal by the wind, the sawdust was an unravelling of the building’s materiality – being the southern hemisphere’s largest timber structure, though modelled to resemble the gravity of stone. Walking around, observing dutifully, the modesty of Ondàk’s intervention was an awkward fit for expectant minds. I heard someone use the word ‘underwhelming’. Having seen what there was to see, the trail reconfigured into a drift towards the cable car and a ride up the steep city slopes to the next stop on the symposium itinerary – the opening night of the survey exhibition Billy Apple: New York 1969-1973 prepared by the Adam Art Gallery.

In his positioning paper opening day two of the symposium program the following morning, Berlin-based critic Jan Verwoert neatly inverted and re-inscribed this flat reception of Camouflaged Building. In an energising presentation illustrated with eclectic pop and cultural references – from YouTube grabs to the Muppets to his latest favourite Christian saint – Verwoert raised the implications of art becoming loaded with the role of inaugurating of public space. Citing this as the overbearing pressure to perform and deliver placed on artists, to meet everyone’s expectations, Verwoert proposed a counter strategy of refusal. By refusing to deliver ‘the big event’ or monumental intervention, artists might work with a ‘mini-grammar of very small gestures’(8), making use of ‘mini-concepts for maxi-ideas’(9). Positioning Ondàk as the perfect exemplar, the piles of sawdust along with a former work consisting of a pointless queue became fitting instances of the non-event. This felt like a direct and healthy case of the symposium’s critical framework informing and expanding on the understanding of the One Day Sculpture projects. From another stance, Ondàk’s intervention stood as the perfect economy for a work scheduled to exist for only twenty-four hours.

Artist Maddy Leach (NZ) also pointed to this underlying question of the sustainability of the One Day Sculpture rationale in her project case study within the second morning’s parallel session. For Perigee #11, Leach’s chosen site was a rundown boatshed across the road from her home in Breaker Bay, outside Wellington. While uncertain of the ethics of developing an elaborate project for just one day, her careful renovation of the shed’s timber interior assured the structure’s longevity beyond its role in her project. Leach’s broader site was the day on which her work took place – 28th August 2008 – selected by long-range weather forecasting methods as the likely date of the year’s worst southerly storm. Knowing little to nothing of this project before the session, it was a pleasure to glimpse the details, processes and decisions enfolding the work, in what Leach’s peer Louise Menzies aptly termed ‘the privilege of the artists talk’. On the contrarily clear blue day that eventuated, the effort by viewers to travel to the boatshed to view the approach of the no-show storm separated them from the course of a regular day. While Leach interestingly chose to remain absent from the work for its duration, preferring that visitors related to the site or each other rather than her. In an echo of Kah Bee Chow’s sentiments the day before, Leach likewise voiced resistance to an interpretation of her work in kinship to relational aesthetics.

Harking back to the spontaneous response on the night of the keynote, the lunch break of day two provided a second interjection to the symposium program. Flyers appeared announcing an impromptu event that day at a city location by Spanish artist Santiago Sierra, and delegates were encouraged to seek it out in the recess. Locating the site on foot, seeing the work, having some lunch and a break all inside an hour was always a long shot, and in the end the snaking queue up the city office block stairwell made it impossible. Rushing back to Te Papa, I got an anecdotal account as we assembled for the afternoon parallel sessions. Creating yet another variation on the abstracted viewing that the symposium hinged on, I heard that once you got to the head of the queue you were ushered alone into a room to see a dejected looking man standing with his penis sticking out of his pants. Others were reading the work as analogous to a peep show and thereby an implied critique of the One Day Sculpture structure. By holding the guerrilla event he developed with a local art student on the same day as an officially scheduled project (Billy Apple’s Less is Moore), Sierra was already creating an interpolation within the curatorial scheme. While Sierra was slated to present a One Day Sculpture project in Auckland in the coming months, it was easy enough to overhear that the directors had hit an impasse in their communications with the artist, and ultimately he presented no official project.

Thanks to the person who thought to arrange the chairs in a circle, the last of my parallel sessions opened out into a more freely discursive exchange. A project case study with Bik Van der Pol and Liz Allan’s commissioning curator Melanie Oliver (speaking in her absence), moderator Laura Preston followed Sierra’s lead and drew the group into a broader curatorial consideration of One Day Sculpture. I found a space to voice my uncomfortable formulations and fluctuations of opinion based only on secondary source materials and the influence of the symposium’s critical reflexive mechanisms – these being rich but insubstantial stand-ins for direct experience of artwork and full appreciation of an artist’s intentions. Jane Rendell was present and suggested that this was what she’d sought to address in her articulation of the ‘non-situated viewer’ in her keynote lecture, returning to the validity of witnessing projects via their traces. I wasn’t sure I agreed with her. Bik Van der Pol outlined the research into the history of activism and protest in New Zealand that was informing their forthcoming project. I’d reached saturation, took no notes and remember leaving the building in the tea break to flop by the water and take a photo of nothing – a frame of spacious sky.

Following a final summation of the symposium’s key thought trains by Mick Wilson, into the hanging pause created by an invitation for closing questions and discussion came a third and last interjection. For the first time over two days the blinds in this Te Papa function room had been opened, revealing the dazzling panorama of a sunny Wellington harbour right outside. Into the gap a dreamy voice in the audience observed, “The Water Whirler is working”. A scan of the vista found a lazy projectile spiral of water at the edge of the skyline – a waterfront public sculpture by one of New Zealand’s most significant artists, Len Lye. The shift of attention to a broader, situated frame of reference beyond the stuffy mental landscape of the room was poignant and short-lived. Claire Doherty launched into a reply to a question no one seemed to have asked, which in hindsight resembled a reply to Santiago Sierra’s indirect critique. Adam Art Gallery director Christina Barton queried whether real world events over the project’s extended duration had made any impact on its development or realisation. Doherty speculated that an earlier occurrence of the global financial crisis might have seriously compromised the project, but otherwise the question went unanswered. The mood for discussion was tentative, and soon filled over with a raft of institutional acknowledgements, thankyous and congratulations by the convenors. The symposium concluded with encouragement to go and view Billy Apple’s One Day Sculpture in the rest of the daylight and to re-group later for a closing knees-up at the Reading Room site at the Engine Room on Massey University campus.

A second cable car ride up the steep hills to the Botanic Gardens found a mixed group of delegates and passers-by milling, meeting and relaxing on the lawn with Billy Apple’s Less is Moore: a double-sided billboard trailer pulled up alongside Henry Moore’s sculpture Bronze Form (1985-86). In open letter format, Apple pointed to the Wellington Sculpture Trust’s disregard of Moore’s intentions by waxing the sculpture to prevent change and degradation to its surface. As light faded the group dispersed and two of us detached from the symposium’s social body and headed to the concert being held in the Civic Square to raise awareness of Earth Hour, which happened to be that night. The homely crowd gathered by candlelight singing along to the medleys of The Wellington International Ukulele Orchestra made for a tender and authentic civic warmth and spirit. Re-joining the fray later at the Engine Room party, it was strange to find everyone standing around with drinks again, as though at an exhibition opening. Maybe this is the only way people in the art world know how to relate to each other. An Australian colleague was surprised to hear it had been Earth Hour that night – over dinner with a scrum of professional peers, it had totally passed them by. On introduction to a local artist, I was surprised to be asked point blank, “Who do you work for?” This seemed to describe that it’s typically employees of institutions who travel to attend symposiums, and exposed the institutionalisation of relations habitual to certain layers of the art scene. In day one’s curatorial debate Jon Bywater spoke of the importance of artists getting to do things on their own terms as much as possible. This could be usefully extended to how we meet, encounter and engage with each other.

By the end of five days in Wellington, the feeling of having been enfolded into an ever-proliferating program almost overrode the sense of immersion in an actual place. The virtual extraction from the goings-on of the world created by two days of highly specialised attention was relieved by the three interjections, which in their own ways – crudely, latitudinally, gently – sliced through the infrastructure to give glimpses of other perspectives and atmospheres. I’d travelled to New Zealand from Melbourne, having taken part in the artist-initiated West Brunswick Sculpture Triennial (10), which likewise hinged on a temporal structure and place-based works. Involving twenty-four artists working across five sites within one suburb over four weekends, the ambition of the wBST was melded with an economy of scale that located projects in homes and backyards, a neighbourhood and real lives; making public existing practices, relationships and sites inside its duration. By contrast the impulse of One Day Sculpture to fix the fleeting nature of the works it commissioned into cascading forms of documentation – images, texts, website, symposium and publication – problematised its own publicity line, ‘Here today, gone tomorrow’. While reproduction is professional art’s key currency, in my experience the symposium took for granted the understanding of temporal work beyond its time and place and exaggerated the phenomenon of documentation coming to stand for actual work. The forthcoming One Day Sculpture book is being positioned as a demonstration of how the constellation of projects will be ‘encountered and remembered’ (11). For the many of us in the second wave public constituted by the symposium who weren’t always fortunate to be there, neither applies. This is the privilege of the immeasurable, incidental publics present in small and large places who witnessed each sculpture in its full expression on its one and only day.

Lisa Kelly
August 2009

notes.

(1) New Zealand curatorial collective Cuckoo, see http://www.cuckoo.org.nz
(2) Jane Rendell Art and Architecture: A Place Between, London: I.B. Tauris, 2006 and Jane Rendell Site-Writing: The Architecture of Art Criticism, London: I.B. Tauris, forthcoming.
(3) Jane Rendell (The Re-Assertion of Time Into) Critical Spatial Practice, One Day Sculpture Academic papers online, http://www.onedaysculpture.org.nz. © Jane Rendell and Litmus Research Initiative, Massey University. Published by Massey University, 2009.
(4) Mark Hutchinson Four Stages of Public Art, Third Text, volume 16, Issue 4 2002 pp.429-438.
(5) ibid, p.438
(6) Patrick Laviolette Predicament of Placelessness, One Day Sculpture Critical Responses online, http://www.onedaysculpture.org.nz. © Patrick Laviolette and Litmus Research Initiative, Massey University. Published by Massey University, 2008.
(7) Patrick Laviolette, ibid.
(8) Jan Verwoert, author’s notes, positioning paper, One Day Sculpture symposium 28th March 2009.
(9) Jan Verwoert, ibid.
(10) Curated by the Open Spatial Workshop collective, see http://www.osw.com.au/wbst
(11) One Day Sculpture website http://www.onedaysculpture.org.nz

With thanks to Anneke Jaspers and Spiros Panigirakis.

To be published in the forthcoming publication THE WEEKLY, CLUBSproject Inc, Melbourne.

The Lively Plane (continued).

February 2008 - June 2009
growing and ongoing
and part of:

There Goes the Neighbourhood

curated by Zanny Begg & Keg de Souza
The Performance Space
May-June 2009
Sydney

By June 2009 «The Lively Plane (continued)» will have played out along the leafy length of Wilson Street - plus inner-west & city sidelines - over two summers, two autumns, a winter and a spring. In February 2008 I used a commercially farmed London Plane tree (Platanus x acerifolia) in a work for the exhibition «1.The Lively Plane» at the Institute for Contemporary Art Newtown (ICAN) at 191 Wilson St.

Then and now, my interest is in the strong opinion and emotion that attends plane trees. They are both the most commonly planted street tree in Sydney, other Australian capitals and many world cities, and the most widely disliked for the profuse, fine, allergy-provoking bristles that aid seed dispersal from the flower-heads. They are the trees that everyone hates. While favoured for their tolerance of contemporary urban conditions - bad air, poor light, compacted soil and little water - their detractors are many, from talkback radio callers to prominent Australian scientist Tim Flannery. Flannery has often argued against the planting of London planes in Sydney streets, as both a persistent mimicry of European cities and a failure to explore alternatives from our ample native species that would better foster insect life and biodiversity, which plane trees notably do not.

In one of many conversations with passers-by at ICAN, I met a resident growing planes from the abundant seed distributed by local street trees. I guerrilla planted the ICAN plane onto the nearby Eveleigh Carriage Workshops site, but it died in the spring. At the same time I began propagating from the ready surplus of seed lying in the streets for «2. Field Work». «The Lively Plane (continued)» has become a mesh of daily practices including cultivation, observation, reading, problem-solving, mistake-making and consultation - bridging the sites of the street, studio, home garden and public gallery. A learning-by-doing exercise in amateur horticulture, the potential disruption to the regulated management of street trees by city councils points to the minimised influence of individuals in planting public space. Likewise the significance of ‘leafy streets’ to neighbourhood desirability and nature’s entanglement in the mechanics of gentrification becomes another resonant thread.

The project culminates as part-installation, part-potting shed for offspring of Wilson Street’s own avenue of planes within «There Goes the Neighbourhood» - engaging inside and out of the CarriageWorks site (229-245 Wilson St) and the material language of street and tree management in the wider field of Eveleigh and Redfern. Lastly the trees will be dispersed in a gifting gesture appropriating the green-conscious council plant giveaway, handing the future planting and flourishing of these trees over to others.

LK
summer 09.

postscript.

While thick drifts of fallen Plane tree leaves line the local streets, autumn was inadvertently held at bay for these trees by a street light over the building awning where they’d been positioned since late summer. The distortion of the seasons continues via the strong grow lighting that the seedlings will bask in by night at CarriageWorks. As «There Goes the Neighbourhood» approached, I found I’d lost a decisive way of telling people about my project – the simple task of sustaining these trees had become so ingrained in my daily movements, I’d drifted from a clear sense of ‘why’. This presentation represents one moment of many in the lifespan of these trees, more observational than oppositional, through which I might further decipher the meaning of these things in the streets in conversation with others.

LK
autumn 09

materials.
London Plane trees and seedlings grown from seed of Wilson St and local street trees, potting mix, compost, worm castings, mulch, plastics, grow lighting, replica steel tree guards unique to Eveleigh St Redfern designed and installed by the Maintenance department of former South Sydney Council, epoxy primer, dowel, tree wrap, hessian, sand, gravel and cement bricks found on Eveleigh Railway Workshops site, form ply, castors, nylon strap, hardware, plastics, water, sign board, printed text, A0 photocopy, paste.

steel fabrication by Terry Roy

notes.
* A poster on the Wilson St fence line marks the site of the first guerrilla planted Plane.

* The trees will be free to take at the close of the exhibition. If you are interested to plant one or some, please contact me at lkell88 [at] gmail [dot] com or come along on Saturday, 27th June 2009.

reading and reference.

‘The Plane Tree, due to its robust structure and resistance to urban conditions, is particularly suited for planting in the City’s harsh urban environments. Its deciduous nature allows for winter sun and summer shade. Plane trees also have a noted tolerance to pollution and their broad leaves take many airborne particulate pollutants out of City air.’
- City of Sydney Council on Plane Trees.

City of Sydney Street Tree management policy and Master Plan.

‘I used to joke that I’d shout beer all round at my local pub the day someone brought me a plane tree leaf that an insect had actually taken a bite out of. The fact is, that as far as Australian wildlife goes, plane trees are so useless that they might as well be made of concrete.’
- Tim Flannery can buy me a beer.

General Information
Scientific name: Platanus x acerifolia
Pronunciation: PLAT-uh-nus x ass-er-ih-FOLE-ee-uh
Common name(s): London Plane Tree
Family: Platanaceae
Invasive potential: little invasive potential
Uses: specimen; street without sidewalk; shade; parking lot island > 200 sq ft; sidewalk cutout (tree pit); tree lawn > 6 ft wide; urban tolerant; highway median.
- The Institute of Food and Agricultural Sciences (IFAS) fact sheet, University of Florida.

‘An ancient plane grove, for instance, was said to be built by Hercules as a place of worship for his father Zeus. These and other plane trees were revered (prayed to and protected by a guardian, “the chief among trees” [Pliny]), rich (ornamented with gold and watered with wine), famous (associated with Zeus’s abduction of Europa, among other colorful stories), and long-lived (some believed to have lived 1,300 years)—these trees of the rural past, we imagine, were happy. Wutong (Chinese parasol tree), the plane tree’s alleged remote relative (mostly likely unrelated), appeared in classical poetry as old as the Book of Songs, and was known to the Chinese in many images: the single wutong by the well, the first wutong leaf that falls at summer’s end, the broad wutong leaves on which the midnight rain falls. We also imagine these trees, revered by scholars as the only kind where the phoenix would stoop to repose, happy…

Supposing a tree’s affective faculty extend beyond its sensation, we can further imagine its unhappiness in its relationship with humans due to the latter’s confusion, oblivion, and indifference. No longer a significant feature of the landscape, a tree does not induce the feeling of home or exile, nor is it revered as a divine dwelling. Plane or parasol, modern trees feature in contemporary urban landscaping like bricks and cement for space organization…

Focusing on the cases of plane and parasol trees, this paper proposes to address the problem of happiness (or unhappiness) of a tree, and also of the human kind, in a postmodern urban setting: To what extent is an urban tree full or void of being? What competitions (with human beings and with other tree species) does a tree face to survive and propagate? To what extent and in what ways is human beings’ fullness of being dependent on a tree’s full being? What manipulation of the tree (the natural) is exercised by urban dwellers, and what does such manipulation reflect about the happiness or unhappiness of their lives in the postmodern era?’

- On the Happiness of a Tree…and of Men and Women
Dr. Chiu Chu Lee, Julie (Department of Translation, Lingnan University)
download pdf of full extract [52kb]

“I believe that planting these oaks is necessary not only in biospheric terms, that is to say, in the context of matter and ecology, but in that it will raise ecological consciousness-raise it increasingly, in the course of the years to come, because we shall never stop planting.

Thus, 7000 Oaks is a sculpture referring to peoples’ life, to their everyday work. That is my concept of art which I call the extended concept or art of the social sculpture.”

- Joseph Beuys
from 7000 Oaks, essay by Lynne Cooke with statements by Joseph Beuys.
Dia Art Foundation.

‘Dia installed five basalt stone columns, each paired with a tree, at 548 West 22nd Street in 1988, continuing the sculpture project 7000 Eichen (7000 Oaks) by German artist Joseph Beuys. Five different varieties of trees were planted: gingko, linden, bradford pear, sycamore, and oak. In 1996 Dia extended this project by planting 18 new trees, each paired with a basalt stone, on 22nd Street from 10th to 11th avenues, adding Pin Oak, Red Oak, Elm Honey Locust, Gingko and Linden.

Beuys’s project 7000 Oaks was begun in 1982 at Documenta 7, the large international art exhibition in Kassel, Germany. His plan called for the planting of seven thousand trees, each paired with a columnar basalt stone approximately four feet high above ground, throughout the greater city of Kassel. With major support from the Dia Art Foundation, the project was carried forward under the auspices of the Free International University (FIU) and took five years to complete, the last tree having been planted at the opening of Documenta 8 in 1987. Beuys intended the Kassel project to be the first stage in an ongoing scheme of tree planting to be extended throughout the world as part of a global mission to effect environmental and social change; locally, the action was a gesture towards urban renewal.’
- Dia Art Foundation long term project resources on 7000 Oaks by Joseph Beuys.

ARBORICULTURAL ASSESSMENT AND
DEVELOPMENT IMPACT REPORT FOR THE NORTH EVELEIGH SITE
Wilson St, Darlington

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY
‘Landscape Matrix Pty Ltd has been engaged by the Redfern-Waterloo Authority to prepare an Arboricultural report in respect to trees on or adjacent to the North Eveleigh site at Wilson Street, Darlington. The report is prepared to satisfy the Director-General’s Requirements issued in accordance with Section 75F of the Environmental Planning and Assessment Act 1979 for the Concept Plan for North Eveleigh.

The report identifies those trees that will require removal in the Concept Plan for the redevelopment of the site for a mix of uses including commercial buildings, residential apartments, community facilities and open space. The report also identifies trees that may be potentially affected by the proposed development, and makes recommendations with regard to other trees based on their species and condition.

The site has been developed and used for railway workshops for many decades in the past and the site has been cleared of its original vegetation for a long period of time. Some replanting of exotic and Australian plants has occurred over time in parts of the site. Many of the plantings are in declining health and very few of the trees within the site are of high landscape significance. A total 141 trees are located on the site, with an additional 82 trees located on Wilson Street, adjacent to the site.

The most significant vegetation on the site occurs at the eastern end in the vicinity of the Chief Mechanical Engineer’s Office building. These significant trees will be retained.’

- prepared by Landscape Matrix Pty Ltd, March 2008.
download pdf of full report [776kb]

street notes.


Eveleigh, Petersham, Chippendale, Redfern, Darlington, Surry Hills.
Sydney

statistics.
sep 08 : seeds planted - 100

oct 08 : seeds germinated - 53

nov 08 : seedlings - 51

dec 08 : seedlings - 50

jan 09 : seedlings - 39

feb 09 : treelings - 39 / batch 2. seeds pre-germinated - 75

mar 09 : treelings- 39 / batch 2. seedlings - 55

apr 09 : treelings - 39 / batch 2. seedlings - 50

may 09: treelings - 39 / batch 2. seedlings - 44
 
 
for helping hands, skills, gear and know-how
thanks & acknowledgements to: Lucas Ihlein, Josie Cavallaro, Sarah Goffman, Bec Dean, Richard Manner, Garth Knight, Keg de Souza, Zanny Begg, Terry Roy, Rohan Stanley, Simon Barney, Anne Kay, Jakob Jakobsen, Karen Sweeney (City Arborist, City of Sydney), Simon Cavanough, Govinda Webster, Annandale Garden Centre, Peter Jackson, Jane Polkinghorne, Anne Kay, Anne Deslandes, Alex Gawronski, Carla Cescon, Dennis Tan.
 
 

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