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| ART CARVES ITSELF A PLACE IN 3-D, by Kerry Edwards |
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| Imagine having thousands of unfired bricks dumped in your
garden, laying them out, carving coding, carting, firing and delivering
them to a building site, then sorting and laying them like a 3-D jigsaw
in a confined area and overseeing their metamorphosis into a curved wall
30 metres long and 3.6 metres high.
Artists Anne Neil, Steve Tepper and Mark Illich accomplished this feat for the visitors' courtyard at the new Banksia Hill Juvenile Detention Centre near Perth. The wall (part of the Per Cent For Art program which allocates some of the construction budget for public buildings to art works) tends to break the ice during awkward encounters. Stylised eggs in the nest, weathervane birds, streaming flight lines, cloud-filled niches, water and a tree portray the theme of roots and wings - stability and freedom. The real ice-breakers, however, are boots (in bronze) from West Coast Eagles footballer Chris Lewis that have been placed on curved steps before a somewhat surreal doorway in the wall. The same team produced art work for the mall, an area where detainees spend their free time. Another theme, A Sense of Place, helps to ameliorate the disorientation felt by many of the young offenders. Art works symbolising Western Australian towns and geographical features are studded in to the paving, suggesting a state map. Broome, not surprisingly, is a big broom. The head serves as a seat, and the six-metre handle recalls a tidal marker in that region of giant tides. A fish-tagging project run by Carnarvon schoolchildren inspired a cluster of nine upturned buckets from which bronze fish spill. Eight buckets are red with a letter cast into the base to spell most of the town's name; the final "n" lies on the paving beside a banana skin (the area is known for growing the fruit). Juveniles from the Kununurra area can find solace in a block of Kimberley black granite, highly polished except for two rough faces of yellow ochre into which are chiselled drawings done by two detainees. A huge bathplug represents Lake Disappointment (Gumbubindil). Another reference to the fry continent is the Kalgoorlie piece - a length of waterpipe bristling with 178 "gold" taps (only one works). The Torndirrup (Albany area) mosaic depicts the old whaling days. When asked their favourite colours the detainees nominated black, black and more black. So Perth is represented by a black boat form overlaid with a suburban map of white mosaic arteries. |
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