survey

bundoora homestead art centre 

09.08.2017 - 22.10.2017

In a variety of hand crafted mediums, this commissioned work relates to memory and my practice of mapping information and sites and creating new responses to all the collated data.

The installation consists of five elements suspended in the window space, two of which show the floorplan of the current Homestead Art Centre building. Handknit, the 2 floors are viewed separately, the proportions and relationships between the spaces are clearly expressed and can be felt in each stitch.

Hand embroidered, the third element examines the Homestead site, focusing particularly on a vegetation study and how the gardens have altered over time. The original carriageway of the Mansion was tree-lined, with a number of trees hundreds of years old. This element seeks to show the context and scale of the grounds, and the history of the site- it serves as a memorial of how many trees have been replaced over the years, as the Homestead site has developed and changed use.

The final two elements are mixed media drawings, focusing on the differences between two site plans of the Mansion and immediate grounds from 1920 and one from 1938. The site was acquired by the Commonwealth Government in 1920, to house WW1 veteran psychiatric patients, and officially opened as the Repatriation Mental Hospital in 1924. These works examine the alterations to the property, revealing the physical aspects of the site which bear witness to the history held inside the perimeters of the boundary.