THE LAB
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.