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.

to enlarge the images just click on them

This trusty book was my precious companion for my amazing, month long overseas adventure last year- I have filled it with sketches, reflections, ticket stubs, maps, gallery fliers and of course, photographs – I think it has become one of my most treasured possessions.

After spending considerable time researching artists, galleries and sites I put together an application to undertake Field Research as a part of my Practice Led PhD Research at the Australian National Uni. Luckily for me that application was successful and on August 23rd last year I jumped on a big jet plane headed for America. I spent 8 days in the U.S. before heading to Japan for three weeks. For a chicka from country Australia who never expected to go overseas (does a 36hr round trip to NZ count as overseas?) this was a pretty precious experience.

I have meant to write a post about this field research since I returned home last September- there was so much to talk about that the task has just seemed way too daunting…. so I figure that instead of trying to capture my trip in words, I will give you the abridged version via a story in pictures…

Fallingwater, Pennsylvania

My first point of interest was Fallingwater in Pennsylvania. Designed by Frank Lloyd Wrright & constructed in the 1930s, this iconic home is built atop a waterfall in a woodland reserve. It was commissioned by the Kauffman family as a replacement for their humble wooden bungalow which had been their weekend retreat from the industrial city of Pittsburgh where they ran a very successful business. This house embodies my concept of aesthetic subjectivity- it has been designed to wrap around the needs, and the better self, of each of the occupants (Mr & Mrs Kauffman and their adult son).

I was completely rattled from my travels- I spent the first night after a long journey in a dodgy as motel, I was commanding a hire car on the wrong side of the road & had to venture into the world of Walmart before getting to Fallingwater- I stayed nearby (at a much safer motel) and spent two days at Fallingwater, and took three guided tours of the home. It restored me, it was magic – an utterly indulgent, idealised building – but magic nonetheless, go there, you’ll love it…

here’s a link to the website: http://fallingwater.org/

Here’s the money shot:

The Mattress Factory in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

Here’s a link to there website http://mattress.org/

I came here primarily to see Chiharu Shiota’s installation Trace of Memory. It was meant to be a site specific installation in an old “Mexican War” House, a three story terrace just down from the Mattress Factory itself. I am not sure exactly how site specific it was but it was definitely a good example of the things that Shiota does well. It was a rather compelling space to spend time in, especially in the third floor where the summer heat filled the air and created the overbearing sense of memories presence.

I also got to see work by Yayoi Kusama

This crazy trippy tube by Sarah Oppenheimer

And early works for James Turrell which gave me a really useful context for later parts of my field research which sought him out with more focus.

New York

In fact the very next part of journey was to New York City to meet with Guggenheim curator Nat Trotman who worked on James Turrell’s 2013 retrospective at the Guggenheim, including the creation of the new work Aten Reign- created specifically for the Guggenheim’s atrium. Nat was so generous with his time, speaking with him really deepened my appreciation of Turrell’s processes. I wish I had’ve been able to see Aten Reign, the photographs of it look compelling- I met a woman at Fallingwater who had seen it for herself, I asked her what it was like, she replied with such a smile “Light, Oh! It was All Light”

check out this link too… http://www.guggenheim.org/video/james-turrell

I spent three nights in New York and I feel in love just a little bit… My first night was in Harlem and my other two nights were a little lower, West 72nd St, just near Central Park and a short walk from the Hudson River. While I loved the bustle of the city it felt as thought it pushed me out of itself, into green spaces – such as the park & the river. After spending time in the dense summer forest at Fallingwater and contemplating the pull of the natural world in the work of both Frank Lloyd Wright and James Turrell I felt kindred with their sense of connection to the natural systems that exist over and above our urban worlds.

I visited the Guggenheim purely to experience Wright’s architecture- it really helped me to develop some of my field questions around how and why we construct different spaces, and how human life can be enhance through spaces that service and enable particular needs and activists.

Oh the High Line… a reclaimed stretch of elevated railway line in the old meat packing district in Manhattan’s Lower West Side… great example of a civic space that is able to enrich community life  …it also creates a much needed strip of organic life in a very dense concrete jungle

And a site that I found quite profound to visit was the 911 Memorial. I visited twice. The first time I did not take any photographs. I walked around, I watched, I observed people, I observed my own responses to the site. I was taken by the size of the pits which are now deep granite memorial pools with water endlessly disappearing down into the earth.

I thought they would be smaller somehow, they were massive, imposing. Standing beside these massive slippery, deep black holes I had the strongest sense of my own need for caution. Watching small children reach up and attempt to climb the name imprint edge I felt an embodied urgency to scoop them away in case they toppled over and fell into the pit.

Compared to the skyscrapers around it, it is clear that this site is about absence. An absence that is surreal when set within the relentless noise of new construction just nearby and the colour and movement of the thousands of visitors to the site.

You can’t help but notice the spectacle of the site. We have become so accustomed to relating to novel, significant and compelling moments through our cameras. We photograph the present in order to preserve it, to process our feelings towards it whilst in some way deferring these same feelings for some later contemplation.

Every now and then I would notice people who clearly were not mere tourists to the site. A husband and wife stopped at the edge of one, he tenderly touched a name that was cast into the steel rim. He looked reverent and solemn. She motioned to take his photograph.

Well that’s the first part of my journey & it’s all I have time for for now… I’ll share my thoughts & images from Japan as soon as I get a chance to 🙂 

*CLICK on the IMAGES to Enlarge them 🙂

here’s a link to a pretty well represented interview that I did with the Weekly Times in the lead up to Fun4Kids

http://www.weeklytimesnow.com.au/country-living/warrnambools-fun4kids-has-a-sticky-situation/story-fnkeragy-1227411149684

Earlier this year I was approached to run an art space at this year’s Fun4Kids Festival. The festival’s zone’s programmer, Rebecca Elmes, had found a rather cool program by Melbourne based artist Briony Barr. Tape It is a collaborative drawing program developed by Briony. Participants use different coloured electrical tape to create “expanded” drawings – as in drawings that extend across walls, floors, windows and other objects within the space. These cooperative drawings conclude with “undrawing” where participants peel the drawings up and layer them to create three dimensional objects. These objects can then be cut open to reveal the coloured layers that resemble a geological form. You can find out more about Briony’s practice by following these links…

http://www.brionybarr.com/Tape-It-Collaborative-Drawings

We decided to approach this project as a collaborative mentorship, we called it Taping Spaces. Briony guided me through Tape It’s concepts and logistics. I spent a day at Art Play Melbourne to witness Tape It in motion and we had many phone calls and emails in the build up for the festival. We successfully applied for a Regional Arts Victoria Grant to help make this all happen.

In my own practice I am interested in how we create the different spaces that we occupy- what are the ways in which we manage to create different environments from day to day or from person to person. This is where the collaboration kicked in. Fun4Kids is a 7 day festival. Taping Spaces was set-up in the large space that is the Warrnambool Art Gallery’s Temporary Exhibition Space. The festival director was keen to make sure each family visiting the festival had a different experience each day. To do this I ran a different drawing theme each day- The Rainforest, In the City, The Milky Way etc. I was also able to tweak physical aspects of the space- movable walls, rearranging display boxes, changing lighting (inc. UV Light & Spotters) and music. It was brilliant to be able to play with the space in these different ways over the course of the week.

Most importantly people had a ball. Families would spend an hour and a half at a time, many came back to keep drawing over the course of the festival. It is this aspect of arts programing that I have really come to love- setting up situations that enable people, especially families, to interact with each other.

Each day we would start with a blank canvas that was transformed into a temporary world. Each afternoon we would “undraw” the space until it appeared as though nothing had happened. It was brilliant fun, and exhausting too. On the final day Dion Barker set-up a time lapse camera to capture this process. You can find it by following this link- it’s pretty cool (thanks Dion!)

Taping Spaces produced so many colourful creations, it was hard to pick favourites. Such a great experience, thanks for letting me hop into your program Briony Barr! & thanks for the great opportunity Rebecca Elmes 🙂