The Life of the Claisebrook: A series of sculptural (& sound) interventions along the Claisebrook, East Perth, West Australia. The persistent factor throughout time including the disruptions caused by settlement and industrialization, is the water. Each art piece refers to this fact from the thrusting  of water through pavers at the source, crumbling walls that expose older layers of brick and stone. The locally extinct long necked turtle is represented in concrete forms along the lake and stream, 2 native tea-trees push up through the artificial stream-bed to work in an ironic way with the Europeanized park. the sound of a miniature waterfall tumbling into a resonating pool is collected by hydrophone and transmitted to a series of speakers in a pedestrian underpass. Graphic equalization selects the brightest sounds orchestrated amidst the deeper sound of traffic passing above. The pool is interactive with people and the weather.

Collaborators: James Stockwell (Tract Landscape Architects) and Rob Muir (sound engineer).
Picture
The Resonating Pool with miniature waterfall.
 Picture
Locally extinct Tea-trees push up through pavers.
The Subterranean Listening Device: A buried seismometer sends signals of earth tremors to a solar powered sound system, which is also underground. The sounds of earth tremors are conveyed to listening stations some distance away from the source.

Location: in the Mundaring Sculpture Park, in the hills east of Perth, Western Australia.
 Picture
Picture
A typical listening station.
Flashpoint: (details of an event at the Casula Powerhouse Regional Gallery, Sydney) a collaborative project between the artist Nola Farman and the knowledge holders of the D'harawal people, Frances Bodkin, Gavin Andrews and the Late George Fisher of the Waradjuri people. It is a work that expresses a sense of place that works beyond a limited sense of time and culture. The chosen word Darimi was burned into the ground in a healing ceremony devised by the traditional owners in the knowledge that even after nature and human intervention has obscured the word, the scar remains deep in the earth. As Frances said, "Darimi is a word that can be loosely translated into English as 'timeless' or 'endless' or 'it began a long time ago and it will never end'"It was devised as a work of reconciliation.
The Tidal Indicator - a single arc of steel reaches up 9.5 meters from a boardwalk and down 15 meters  into the tidal flat between the walkway and a heritage wall. Span 18meters.The arc resonates with the idea of the river, the tides, the passage of time. The ultramarine blue is the colour of ocean depths. The end of the arc at the river surfacce is painted with black and yellow bands to show the full range of tidal flow of a river far inland. The heritage wall shows the natural patina of the river levels.  On the boardwalk end, the arc emerges from the ground between two stone blocks that have been cut into layers (based on echo sounding charts of the bed of the river. A text carved into the surface is like a mathematical formula connecting the artwork and the river.

Writer: Anna Gibbs
Location: Almost under the Storey Bridge, Brisbane, Queensland.