If suburbs can feel envious of one another (and of course they can, and do) then every other suburb of our city will feel jealous of Crace in Gungahlin when it learns of an especially senses-tickling exhibition, Contemplating Crace: First Thoughts, now decorating the ANU's School of Art.
Subscribe now for unlimited access.
$0/
(min cost $0)
or signup to continue reading
This may be the first time a single Canberra suburb has attracted such intense artistic attention from such an accomplished cohort of artists. Contemplating Crace is a selection of work produced by undergraduate, post-graduate and practising artists from the School of Art. One of the artists, Carolina Velastegui Paez, has even credited enviable Crace with its very own mythical/magical Beings (one of them pictured here), entities all of us will wish our own drearily Beings-impoverished suburbs had.
Back to the Beings in a moment but first we need to ask, our voices ringing with envy, why Crace has been so singled out for such enviable attention.
ANU Emeritus Fellow John Reid, an organiser of the School of Art's investigations of Crace (and a contributor to the exhibition) explains that it's a response to a University of Canberra Crace Study. That study is predicated on the way in which Crace has been progressively designed as a ‘mini-city’ with features it's hoped will have long-term benefits for the health and well-being of the about 4000 souls that will live there. So for example Crace (which feels different when you visit it) is meant to be a "walkable" suburb, compact enough to be walked around and blessed with 25 per cent of its land set aside for common use. The UC's Crace Study is meant to investigate over time whether or not Crace's artful planning really does make people more blissful.
The School of Art, responding to Crace's specialness as a planned place, has gone looking for any harder-to-define Crace uniquenesses.
The artists found uniquenesses of all sorts, some of them deriving from the fact that Crace is being built before our very eyes, making it in some senses a building site, with all of a building sites' sights and sounds. So for example one of the most attention-snaffling pieces in the show is Andrew Lyne's Workers At The 'Central By Goodwin', 18 big colour portraits of 18 individual blokes (each formally posed for a moment) erecting a big building. Lyne mused that while these chaps are vital to the erection of a building that will one day be a permanent Crace landmark they, they the workers, will one day be gone and forgotten. He wanted to capture them and honour them.
John Mills' Sound Portrait of a Suburb invites us to listen to among other things the busy and exciting hammering, drilling, building noises that give new suburbs a kind of special percussion we don't get in our snoozing, snoring, finished suburbs. Mills' work comes with a spectrogram that turns the sounds into a kind of 'painting' using uniquely Craceian colours.
Crace is a brand new suburb, emerging in what is a geologically (with shales 450 million years old) and anthropologically ancient place. This inspired Carolina Velastegui Paez and she has responded with her tremendous Beings of the Alcheringa Time. What look like plain lines in her works are strings of words.
She explains that they're "drawings and digital compositions made of mythical beings inspired by the Aboriginal site Yurwang Dhaura at Crace".
"Textures and patterns found in Crace's natural surroundings form the base for these half-animals, composed with a mixture of lines and words. I'm using words in Spanish, English and the Australian Aboriginal language of the Ngunnawal people to bring the beings to life. The use of texts in different languages makes reference to my personal experience of being a foreigner [she is from Ecuador] in a new country.
"The art work pays tribute to the importance that mythical beings have in the collective memory. This process was inspired and informed by the setting of Crace ... where the presence of scarred trees on the Yurwang Dhaura site is a living testimony [to an Aboriginal presence]. Alcheringa is a word that relates to the Dreamtime, the first place where man and nature come to be."
Contemplating Crace has, too, some witty items, and they include, hanging up on a wall, a giant echidna costume on which the echidna's spines are made of wooden clothes pegs.
This is Hannah Hoyne's and Amelia Zaraftis' The Apron of the Honourable A.Z. Echidna, Kaleen's Ambassador to Crace.
From this we seem to discover that enviable Crace, on top of all of its other qualities and advantages, is even a kind of sovereign state to which other suburbs must send diplomats.
Yes, those of us who live in and have grown up in old and middle-aged Canberra (this columnist's home is in middle-aged and snoozing Garran) may feign an indifference to infant, gauche Gungahlin. But some of us notice in ourselves a hitherto unnamed syndrome I will call Gungahlin Envy (GE). This columnist has CE (Crace Envy) too. Gungahlin Envy syndrome has something to do with the newness and optimism of Gungahlin, that sense of boundless possibilities. This contrasts with older, wrinkled, stale Canberra where there are no glimpses of mythical beings to brighten the drab predictability of our days.
Contemplating Crace - First Thoughts is in the School of Art's Foyer Gallery until 21 June.
