Bundanon

Museum Season | Siteworks 2022: From a deep valley

26 November 2022 – 12 March 2023

These learning experiences are informed by the Museum season exhibition Siteworks 2022: From a deep valley and are connected conceptually to the theme of ‘a weather report’, reflecting on the role of the artist as a type of weather balloon. An exploration of materials and their uses also connects the three learning experiences.

ACTIVITIES FOR MUSEUM SEASON: SITEWORKS

Spark Ideas (1 hour)

Participants explore and analyse artworks on display in the Art Museum and on permanent display outdoors at Bundanon. They will examine the use of natural materials, the transformation of materials and how to message environmental and personal concerns to an audience.

Ecological Dialogues (2 hours)

In this collaborative experience, students engage in a public art action that introduces them to new skills and ecological principles. It will take three people’s actions to get seeds planted at Bundanon. This encourages empathetic connections to unknown people through shared actions for the environment. Learners will explore, using art to sharing personal and political messages, and investigating contemporary art practices as action. They will create handmade seed paper so that future schools and visitors can contribute to a planting site. The students will also have an opportunity to add messages to paper made by previous learners, for future visitors to read and plant at our Siteworks regeneration site. This experience will draw on the artwork of Susan Jacobs, Carolyn Eskdale and Kate Scardifield in the Museum to explore materiality and transformation. Learners will focus on caring for Country through the planting of native species and concepts of regeneration and endemic species.

Ephemeral weather collaborations (3 hours)

Engaging deeply with a place fosters a culture of caring for the environment where people notice, interact with, and come to appreciate the natural world by going beyond usual everyday interactions. Anchored in traditions of environmental sculpture and playing in the space of contemporary practice, learners will create a sculpture that responds to and interacts with the weather: e.g., kinetic interactions with wind, exploitation of shadows, rain shelter or gathering/direction of running water etc. The workshop can be experienced individually or in small groups of no more than three people. The activity develops ideas encountered in the Art Museum, such as the use of natural materials in unexpected ways in the work of Isadora Vaughn. Reference to the Dharawal Seasonal calendar will locate the workshop in local Indigenous knowledges.

Prevailing moods: an internal weather report (3 hours)

Responding directly to thematic concepts of Siteworks, Prevailing Moods captures our innermost feelings and uses abstract mark-making to represent the artist’s internal ‘weather report’. Inspired by Siteworks artist Lucy Simpson, learners will utilise a choice of naturally derived inks and pigments gathered from around the site. Students will be engaged in making experimental paints from different raw materials and river water that are indicative of the weather and seasons, and including products of extreme weather events (bushfire charcoal, silt from riverbank, ochre clays from roots of trees that have fallen over in the extreme rain and foraged plants (with approval from First Nations Custodians and our Natural Resources team). After considering personal and cultural associations between mood and colour, students will interrogate their own changing moods at points prompted during their stay and create a visual record of these during the workshop. A final group action will be to create a timeline display of the resulting artworks and then to curate a smaller display with different parameters set by each group.