The Melbourne Arts Precinct Corporation (MAP Co) and the University of Melbourne's joint artist-in-residency program engages artists to work alongside researchers and respond to themes of ecology, sustainability and biodiversity explored through the Melbourne Arts Precinct Plant Trials.
Through these residencies, artists work alongside researchers from the Faculty of Science at the University’s Burnley Campus and have access to a studio and the Plant Trials, as well as access to living botanical collections, nurseries and glasshouses, and a wide range of materials from the University’s archival and art collections. Embedded in the horticultural campus, the artists connect with academics, ecologists and botanists, discover the nuances of the plants, and immerse themselves in the research project.
Inspired by the research, the artists will create work that gives a creative voice to the Plant Trials and related concerns around ecological sustainability and renewal. In collaboration with the University’s Faculties, curriculum and public outcomes will be produced including education programs with University of Melbourne students from a range of disciplines, exhibitions, publications, and events in the Test Garden at Fed Square.
The first two visual artists selected are interdisciplinary artist Keg de Souza and sculptor Francis Carmody. Keg de Souza is an architecturally trained artist of Goan ancestry who creates work that explores plant politics, themes of displacement and the stories of plants, people and place, while Francis Carmody’s practice traces social and natural networks as a form of speculative storytelling through a variety of creative mediums.
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Compressions
Hidden amongst the dense foliage of the Test Garden, you’ll find a new sculptural installation by artist-in-residence Francis Carmody – a series of works that explore the physical imprint of time on matter, reflecting on research into plants and material form.
Compressions is a new public artwork at Fed Square, and the first public outcome of the Test Garden artist-in-residence program.
The work comprises a series of small-scale relief sculptures installed within the Test Garden, which connect ongoing garden experiments and scientific research underway at the University of Melbourne’s Burnley Campus with the garden.
Developed in dialogue with Dr Dean Schrieke’s research from the Plant Trials at Burnley, the works translate his findings and the diversity of the garden’s species into sculptural form.
Each relief is cast and carved from onsite materials including beeswax, ceramic and experimental substrates. These processes collapse geological, botanical and sculptural time scales, folding the logic of growth, pressure and decay into a single surface.
The project mirrors the shared ethos of the artist’s studio and the scientific method, where questioning, experimentation, observation and iteration form parallel ways of understanding the world around us. By bridging these two modes of inquiry, Compressions proposes the Test Garden as both a site and a method for a living experiment in how matter records time.
Acknowledgements
The artist-in-residence program, facilitated by MAP Co and the University of Melbourne’s Burnley campus and Art Museums, is supported as part of the Victorian Government’s Melbourne Arts Precinct Transformation project. The program offers yearly studio residencies to visual artists whose practice is informed by a deep interest in plants, horticulture and ecology.
The Melbourne Arts Precinct Plant Trials is a partnership between The University of Melbourne (Burnley Campus), MAP Co, Development Victoria, design practice Hassell, plant practice Super Bloom and international horticulturalists James Hitchmough and Nigel Dunnett. The Test Garden at Fed Square is supported by Bupa.