STUDIONONSTOP

 
 
 
 
 

 

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. Continue Reading »