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Friday, 11 March 2011

In a happy coincidence, the first commemoration of our centenary has coincided with the Perth International Arts Festival.

It makes perfect sense then for UWA’s Cultural Precinct to celebrate our beautiful campus with a series of outdoor art installations both as part of the Festival and to encourage centenary guests to have a dialogue with the landscape.

Dialogues with Landscape shows off eight local artists from vastly different genres.

Diokno Pasilan brought a Filipino tradition to the Great Court where he has erected an ethereal village house whose appliquéd walls wafted in the breeze. His Memory House has then become a workshop space where he teaches families to play simple gong instruments three evenings a week during the exhibition.

Dialogues with Landscape runs for three weeks, with the artists performing, demonstrating or running workshops at their installations several times.

George Egerton-Warburton delivers a series of nine short performances from the top of a buggy in the Great Court. The narrative is inspired by conversations with students, academics and other University staff.

Across the lawn from his stage, Nien Schwarz tends Radicle , 100 native seedlings, wrapped lovingly in sleeping bags and bearing tags that reference UWA research.

Dialogues’ curator, Katie Lenanton, said Radicle spoke of UWA as a nurturing ground for knowledge, positioned as it was in the shadow of the Reid Library.

Some simple French knitting hangs from UWA’s iconic Great Tree behind Winthrop Hall. Movement sensors activate birdsong, so just as viewers are wondering what the knitted sculptures are all about, they are engulfed in a cacophony of sound.

Bennett Miller has painted some grass bright blue and entices the peacocks onto it on most evenings.

And Convocation’s Pavilion Project has come to fruition in Whitfeld Court, with the construction of Italian architects Elisa Mansutti and Luca Pavarin’s winning design for a an environmentally friendly emergency shelter for communities at times of disaster.

Visitors to the Somerville for PIAF’s film season are treated to images played on a wall outside the auditorium. Julian Stadon has used tracking technologies to produce images from the sounds made by the movement of large groups of people.

In Winthrop Hall, Rachael Dease has captured the structure and design of our most famous building with fragments of string quartet music.

Ms Lenanton said the exhibition was open to early career artists from anywhere, but eight locals had been chosen. “It was great having people who were already familiar with the campus,” she said.

Published in UWA News

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