In late 2016 I was commissioned by Mercy Place Aged Care Warrnambool to create a mural for their high care ward. The brief was to address two spaces within the ward. The first was the entrance hall which looked primarily like a hospital corridor. It was white and sterile. The second space was a twelve meter long wall within the dining room. Staff and management had expressed a desire to create a more warm and welcoming space within this wing of the facility which cared especially for those with dementia.

The design I created for the entrance hall sought to replicate a living room. I created a wall paper pattern and stencil to bring some domesticity to the hospice space. A fire place was painted at toward the end of the hall to draw attention away from the ward’s main doors. A plant stand was painted on the main doors in an effort to disguise the door handles.

The design for the dining room was a lot of fun. I needed to work around a number of fixtures such as the kitchen service roller door and a metal radiator. These provide the seeds for ideas- the roller door became a centre piece in the “Great Ocean Road Diner” food cart, and the radiator became part of a steel fence around a beach shack.  The scene that I created was comprised of a number a smaller scenes inspired by the Warrnambool and district landscape. This was done quite deliberately to reference settings familiar to the wards residents.

I began work on the project in August and completed it in November. Locale painter and decorator Rik Fox got the walls primed with coloured base coats – soothing green in the entrance hall, warm ocher in the dining room. Rik was a gem to work with. It was a massive undertaking but a pleasure at the same time- I became an artists in residence of sorts and found myself performing the role of painter as much as I actually painted.

I met some wonderful staff, residents, and volunteers during my time working on the mural. I was often given suggestions for things to add as I painted, and often I took these up- the chickens are among these.

I had joyful conversations with residents for whom the painting stirred their own recollections  of farm life, childhood, or whatever. There were so many characters. I am happy to report that the vast amount of people for whom that ward was now home were content, if not happy- and I watched how the artwork I created added to that. It was a lovely place to be a fly on the wall.

Oceanarium was created in response to an EOI advertised by Warrnambool’s Fun4Kids Festival in late 2013. My response to that EOI was the beginning of a long and valuable relationship with the festival which sadly called it a day after 19 wonderful years last month.

Oceanarium took two years to develop before being funded by Festivals Australia, Creative Victoria, and the Isobel & David Jones Foundation in 2016. I worked closely with Fun4Kids Program Coordinator extraordinaire Rebecca Elmes through that development period.

Oceanarium was presented over 7 days at the 2016 Fun4Kids Festival. Film maker and photographer Distan Bach captured the story of this amazing world.

The concept emerged from the idea of letting visitors to the winter festival experience the wonder of our local rock pool environment in the warmth and safety of an indoor art space. I initiated a relationship with Marine Biologists from Deakin University and began to research the idea. Rebecca and I met with Marine Scientist Julie Mondon and were captivated by the marine worlds, known as biomes, she described. As she described the deep dark ocean environment in which sea creatures often emit their own light- I thought of local artist Karen Richards and the intricate worlds she makes using iridescent embroidery. Julie described the many hundreds of hours of film footage collected by Deakin researchers and I thought that local film maker Colleen Hughson could be the right person to interpret these for the space. It became clear that Oceanarium needed to extend from the rock pool world I had first imagined and become an intersection of multiple marine biomes imagined through art. One final artist completed the collaboration- the beautiful hanging textile sculptures made by Narrawong artist Deborah Saunders provided a way to recreate the under water kelp forests that grow along our coasts.

The best thing about my job is getting to work with brilliant people. Thankfully Deborah, Colleen, and Karen jumped on board enthusiastically. Fellow textile artist Sue Ferrari was enlisted by Karen to collaborate, together they create the art biome “Deep Dark Other World.”

Oceanarium’s evolution was captured and shared through our Oceanarium Facebook Page– it was a massive adventure!

Not only did Oceanarium create an incredible multi-sensory world for children and families to explore, it also presented a program of activities which enabled more than 700 people to contribute to its creation. This included the crowd sourcing of footage from marine lovers by Colleen Hughson as well as video editing workshops through which school children and community members created short films for the final installation.

Together Deb Saunders and Becky Nevin Berger (aided Becky’s children and Deb’s grandchildren) taught people how to arm knit and finger knit using recycled t-shirt fabric at the Port Fairy Folk Festival, Flagstaff Hill’s Day on the Hill, and the Warrnambool Art Gallery. With the help of fellow artists Julie Poi Kelly, Becky continued this program through primary schools in Warrnambool, Port Fairy, Koroit, and Dennington. This provided an opportunity to teach students about the wondrous kelp forests that provide food and habitat to sea birds, seals, sea urchins, whales, star fish, and other creatures.

After months and months of hard work, late nights, and weekends in our respective studios, Oceanarium was installed in the Warrnambool Art Gallery for the Fun4Kids Festival. Through our partnership with Deakin University third and forth year marine biology students and education students worked as invigilators within the space` enriching the children’s interaction with the artworks.

Deborah Saunders created the Woven Forest Whale Sanctuary, a series of seven hanging textile sculptures hand dyed and lit with coloured lights to create the sense of an underwater forest.

Colleen Hughson created the Open Ocean Video Sphere which included video projections throughout and almost twenty individual films on screens embedded within the installation space.

Karen Richards and Sue Ferrari created the Deep Dark Other Work in which visitors put on head torches as they “dove” into the deep dark ocean discovering new and strange creatures as they moved through the space.

And I created the Rocky Shore Wonder Space, a large network of wooden sculptures able to be climbed on and through. Inspired by the Pickering Point rock pools in Warrnambool these rock pools were animated by coloured lights, hand engraved Perspex, “rock flaps”, hand made shells, and an assorted of texture fabrics and reclaimed materials.

I even managed to squeeze a little “rock” pool tribute in for these couple of creative geniuses who left the world as Oceanarium came to life- Prince, Lemmy, & Bowie 🙂

It was great to see my work fully installed for the 2015 BEAMS Festival in Chippendale. The very generous residents of this terrace were happy to lend their entrance to the festival for the evening. This space was a perfect fit for my piece, Shower Funnel Wave Form/Standing in this River on its way out to the Sea, it created the sense of enclosure needed to build on the work’s reference of taking a shower.

As the sun went down the street came to life with lights, performance and the hustle of viewers. The light on my work worked brilliantly, helping to generate a sense of an individual space as well as creating a dynamism.

The soundscape was just loud enough to pull people in to listen closer to the work.

I was super stoked to see that my work had been chosen as the face of the BEAMS App too!

Here’s the blurb that accompanied my work:

‘Shower Funnel Wave Form – Standing in this river on its way out to the sea’

Berger’s work seeks to make visible the multi dimensions of time that intertwine with space and matter to create the fullness of reality. The installation consists of a suspended semi-spiral of fleshy storm clouds morphing into a barreling wave from which the resonant sounds of a domestic shower are emitted. “Within the reliable solitude of our daily shower, we are able to turn inward and we are made anew by the washing away of our day and become cleansed; in reality, we are amidst the water cycle, an ancient river diverted into our home. The work recreates and celebrates this daily embrace with nature, and our relationship with the mysterious substance, water”.

Berger has spent considerable time observing domestic space and urban environment looking to pierce the regularity of its stable, constructed surfaces and to coax out both its fluidity and the invisible, over-lapping and coexisting connections that create the spatial-temporal multi-dimensionality of lived reality. In this work Berger uses painting, sculpture and sound to imagine a romantic natural form that sits somewhere between Eugene von Guerard’s gold lit landscapes and James Gleeson’s fresh morphed terrains.

I responded to the artist brief announced as Phenomena late last year. I found that the brief was congruent with my own goals of finding ways to imagine to embodied and material magic that it is to be awake in a living breathing universe. I created this odd, warm form through an intuitive process- I felt the kind of shape that wanted to be made and worked my way through from there.

I laboured over this painterly sculpture through summer and early Autumn and submitted my application to the Beams Festival in March. I was caught by complete surprise when I read an email in early July letting me know that my work was accepted into the festival program, wow!! How exciting to have such a super cool reason to go to Sydney for a complete treat of an art festival 🙂

http://beamsfestival.com.au/whats-on/

http://beamsfestival.com.au/whats-on/artistic-works/becky-nevin-berger/

I really let my heart and my imagination run free with this work. It is titled Shower Funnel Wave Form/Standing in this River on Its way out to the Sea. It is made form a recycled paper and plaster compound and painted in layers of acrylic polymer paint. Embedded within the funnel is a speaker that plays the sound of a running shower. This work draws out understanding of the relationship between humans and the environment that have emerged through my PhD research.

It is a big surreal and romantic ode to water, it is a French kiss to nature.

Tomorrow we hit the road to journey 12 hours to Sydney so that this artwork may meet the world, wish me luck!

I was fortunate to have a space for a week at Scope Galleries at the start of September in order to test out installation approaches for my PhD Research project entitled Activating Aesthetic Subjectivity in Embodied Environments.  The need to test out ideas in the flesh became apparent after a recent trip to ANU to meet with my supervisors. Pursuing a practice led project off-campus can be a tricky situation. For much of my almost four years of research I have spent time imagining how my final installation will unfold- I am at that point now where I need to begin earthing these ideas out to see what works, how is fits together and what comes next.

Whilst I have presented installation from my research in the last year or so they have been based around a single work that creates a single space. Just as the title of my blog suggests, however, I am interested in processing the multi-dimensionality of spaces: Metabolic Synaesthete… synaesthesia being the cross wiring of the sense that I experience and that so drives my creative practice.

So with this experimental space I am bringing together particular lines of thought/studio practice in order to see a) how to further develop them b) how they interact with the other lines of thought c) to see what kind of spaces I can create d) to see what themes/feelings/concepts/aesthetics further emerge…

It begins with layering the floor with spent town planning maps to play with ideas about constructing spaces. & then laying out two bodies of work: my Watershed Dinner Set; my Orange Photo Boxes

Orange Photo Boxes…

adding domestic furniture to build on the sense of warmth and home….

spiral waves, water forms- ebb & flow, entropy & renewal, fluidity, change, cleanliness, clarity…

relationships and interplays

Using video and sound (audio of a washing machine) to fill the space, and to create movement

Splitting video with mirrors- like a digital sky space… cool as results, definitely further exploration to be had…

Playing with this space was so fruitful, it has left me with a bunch of ideas to develop & plans to set up another experimental space just as soon as I can

Earlier this year the Warrnambool Community Garden put out an Expression of Interest for the creation of an installation/interpretive signage that acts to educate the public on the water cycle and the impact of domestic water use on natural ecosystems. The project is part of a longer term campaign by the Heytesbury District Landcare Group’s “Going Upstream” project.

I thought that this could be right up my alley and put together a proposal for how I would approach the work. In July I got the phone call to say that my idea had been selected and that the committee wanted me to get started right away…

The idea I put forward was for the creation of an outdoor sculpture that would mimic a domestic shower and convey the interconnection of our domestic life with the ecosystems in which we are situated. This is part of broader conceptual themes that have developed through my PhD Research which began back in 2012. My research is concerned with how we imagine and understand our connection to our environment- I have been looking to find the material basis for this connection which is so readily felt yet much harder to directly see.

In my first year of research I spent a great deal of time looking at and research the Australian landscape around Warrnambool and around my ancestral home near Albury Wodonga. I spent the second year of my research focused on my more immediate environment, the domestic home that I share with my husband and our three children. Through these processes the extent to which these apparently disjointed spaces overlap and permeate each other became more and more evident. Within this context water emerged as an importable symbol of this interconnection and interchange.

In 2013 I visited the exhibition Talking Water at Craft ACT: Craft + Design Centre Gallery, Canberra. It was an exhibition of work created through an artist in residency program in which four artists use creative practice as a basis to examine our relationship with water. In the catalogue I found a rather profound and simple question from artist Marily Cintra,

“Do we realise that when we open a tap in Canberra we are diverting the river into our homes?

This question prompts us to reconsider the apparent division between our mundane and ordinary domestic worlds and the natural world which we imagine as being “out there”, beyond our urban lives.

The sculpture that I offered in my proposal is one that hopes to develop this line of thinking, one that hopes to stimulate the realisation that when we stand in the shower, wash our clothes, water our gardens or brush our teeth, we are doing so in a river. The Gellibrand River in the Otway Rainforest provides a large amount of Warrnambool’s drinking water. This sculpture aims to honour that particular ecosystem.

The sculpture is a fairly simple structure that mimics or recalls a domestic shower. It will be made from reclaimed timber- kindly donated by the W’Bool Community Garden, coloured acrylic sheet and metal work created by the very talented local craftsman Murray Adams. The top of the structure will have two layers of metal framed, coloured acrylic paddles into which I will etch the images of different plant, bird, animal and fish species that depend on the Gellibrand River.

I am heading out to Murray’s shed this afternoon to see how the metal work is progressing. I have order my acrylic sheet and commenced the drawings from which my etchings will be made- here’s a sample of my colour scheme:

I am pretty excited to see what will emerge from this process. It will all be installed and ready for the public by the second weekend of October… what this space

At the end of last year my frequent and favourite co-collaborator/co-conspirator Julie Poi Kelly and I took on a new participatory art project. An EOI went out via the F Project looking for artists interesting in providing an art program for a memory loss support group. Julie and I decided that this would be a good fit for our collective aims and put together a draft program that was selected to run.

as always you can enlarge these images by clicking on them 🙂

We began with the idea of creating a small series of wooden sculptures. These small objects would have a number of visual and tactile surfaces. They were designed to be handled and could be assembled in various formations. The interconnecting blocks were a metaphor for memories that are held in neural connections and in the connections between people.

The program grew out of the Café Style Support Program provided by Warrnambool City Council for people with dementia and their carers. Our group met once a month from December 2014 until May 2015. Together we would share lunch before setting about creating artworks. Each couple was asked to select a set of six or so blank blocks which would be used as the basis for creating autobiographical, collage based artworks.

One of the things I most valued about this program was the space it created for carers. People whose worlds were in a state of immense transformation due to the effect of dementia upon their loved one were able to find companionship, and a voice, alongside others who knew, all too intimately, the experience and heartbreak brought by this disease. We began this project with about eight couples. We lost one or two because they found that our art program wasn’t what they were looking for, we sadly lost another because the disease claimed the life of one partner and ended the carer role for the remaining party. We were given privileged insight into these people’s worlds- and the compassion, frustration, despair  and love their journeys of transition inspired.

The Exhibition

Five couples completed their artworks and agreed to exhibit in a group show at The Artery in July 2015. The exhibition was titled “Glancing at Glimpses“, a titled coined by one of our talented participants Lyn Turner- she said that this captured the experience of both the carers and their partners. We thought that it was also a perfect description of the artworks.

Julie & I had wanted to present these artworks as an interconnected installation. Des & Helen Bunyon of Customs House  Gallery kindly lent us plinths which we used as the base of the work. We spent a fortnight working in Julie’s shed to create the finished work. Altogether the work is an ensemble of the five participant’s blocks and two other sets of blocks- one made for Julie & I, and another set made by the Carer Respite Officer who managed the program, Tina Larden. We arranged each set of blocks together and then created connecting pieces to create an intertwining artwork that captures ideas of relationships, community and memory.

Here’s an excerpt from our catalogue:

“Despite our lofty artistic ambitions this project was not about the nuances of fine art. It was not even especially about the artworks made or the exhibition that follows. This project was about people coming together, to share their experiences and to support each other. While participants crafted wooden blocks with their own images and memories they formed connections between one another. Life is about connections: the connections between ourselves and our loved ones, with community, with places and experiences, and the neural connections through which we form our sense of self.

This installation invites you to glance at these glimpses of life, to contemplate the layers of rich connection, to imagine the connections yet to be made and to recognise the potential connections that are left unmade.”

This project worked as a participatory art program and it also operated to create a very special space that was essentially a gift to the community. I have contemplated the function of art a lot over the last few years. While projects like this have therapeutic outcomes they are not art therapy in the strict sense. Art therapy is rightly concerned with the process and the impact on the individual participants. Whilst these concerns are central in projects like ours it is also the other dimension of exhibiting the work, creating the space which is vitally important- and very much a community service. Art gives forms to complex feelings and experiences, it provides insights into worlds which are otherwise “other”, obscured and unknown. Glancing at Glimpses was a very personal offering that promoted understanding and empathy for those able to contemplate it.