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If only...[/caption]
When I was first invited to take part in cementa I was enthusiastic but I faced a real problem. Mostly I simply do not make art works, or at least not of the sort that can go in biennale style exhibitions. On the other hand there were many reasons why I wanted to take part. For starters small industrial towns in the country are in my blood, the last three generations of my family all lived in Portland, another cement town near Kandos, and I had known Kandos and the surrounding towns since childhood. You could say I'm the mongrel product of that area and inner city Sydney, the Darlinghurst ridge, where I lived most of my life.
And ten years ago I had moved back to live in Wallerawang, a similar town just east of Kandos. One of my reasons had been my belief that if you are serious about dealing with climate change you need to face those places and people whose survival is dependent on not dealing with climate change, who work in coal mining, cement production, electricity generation and other carbon polluting industries. You need to help create a new economy so they can survive the necessary transition to a low carbon economy.
To top it all off, for several years I had a blog, adaptivereuse.net, that dealt with these issues but had begun with my search for adaptively reused cement works around the world to use when discussing possible futures for Portland. As it happens there are several spectacular examples, the best being the Bouchart Gardens in Canada and Ricardo Bofill's converted house and studio in Spain.
One of the ideas behind cementa was that it should exemplify social practice, that the works should involve the town and invite participation, a principle that has been part of my artistic practice since the 1970s yet in this case, contrarily, I did the opposite, consulted with no-one and only visited to have lunch - and very pleasant it was! As cementa was happening I was in the process of packing up to move out of the area to Linden in the Blue Mountains, closer to Sydney. That meant I was thinking a lot about my decade of living back in my childhood town of Wallerawang and so although it could be said that there was nothing participative about the immediate process it came at the end of many years of active local community involvement and a life time knowledge of the area and its people.
Several years on Lithgow Council's economic development advisory committee had made me all too aware of the difficulties of raising any new ideas with people who cannot imagine a future different to their own past but this provided the solution, to simply give Kandos a different past and present. By not inviting participation I was showing my frustration with the compromised and manipulated outcomes of ten years of innumerable public forums and advisory committee meetings and strategic planning consultations. I should add that Lithgow has a notoriously insular and backward local culture and the reaction to cementa has shown that Kandos is far more open with the potential to adapt and thrive despite its difficult circumstances.
The work was designed to be unobtrusive and almost unrecognisable as an artwork, a sort of Trojan horse that fitted among other typical tourist pamphlets with no immediate signals that it was fictional. Its camouflage was meant to emphasise that it was all potentially very real, and everything in it does exist although not in the present Kandos. Perhaps it may yet be the Kandos of the future?
If only...[/caption]
When I was first invited to take part in cementa I was enthusiastic but I faced a real problem. Mostly I simply do not make art works, or at least not of the sort that can go in biennale style exhibitions. On the other hand there were many reasons why I wanted to take part. For starters small industrial towns in the country are in my blood, the last three generations of my family all lived in Portland, another cement town near Kandos, and I had known Kandos and the surrounding towns since childhood. You could say I'm the mongrel product of that area and inner city Sydney, the Darlinghurst ridge, where I lived most of my life.
And ten years ago I had moved back to live in Wallerawang, a similar town just east of Kandos. One of my reasons had been my belief that if you are serious about dealing with climate change you need to face those places and people whose survival is dependent on not dealing with climate change, who work in coal mining, cement production, electricity generation and other carbon polluting industries. You need to help create a new economy so they can survive the necessary transition to a low carbon economy.
To top it all off, for several years I had a blog, adaptivereuse.net, that dealt with these issues but had begun with my search for adaptively reused cement works around the world to use when discussing possible futures for Portland. As it happens there are several spectacular examples, the best being the Bouchart Gardens in Canada and Ricardo Bofill's converted house and studio in Spain.
One of the ideas behind cementa was that it should exemplify social practice, that the works should involve the town and invite participation, a principle that has been part of my artistic practice since the 1970s yet in this case, contrarily, I did the opposite, consulted with no-one and only visited to have lunch - and very pleasant it was! As cementa was happening I was in the process of packing up to move out of the area to Linden in the Blue Mountains, closer to Sydney. That meant I was thinking a lot about my decade of living back in my childhood town of Wallerawang and so although it could be said that there was nothing participative about the immediate process it came at the end of many years of active local community involvement and a life time knowledge of the area and its people.
Several years on Lithgow Council's economic development advisory committee had made me all too aware of the difficulties of raising any new ideas with people who cannot imagine a future different to their own past but this provided the solution, to simply give Kandos a different past and present. By not inviting participation I was showing my frustration with the compromised and manipulated outcomes of ten years of innumerable public forums and advisory committee meetings and strategic planning consultations. I should add that Lithgow has a notoriously insular and backward local culture and the reaction to cementa has shown that Kandos is far more open with the potential to adapt and thrive despite its difficult circumstances.
The work was designed to be unobtrusive and almost unrecognisable as an artwork, a sort of Trojan horse that fitted among other typical tourist pamphlets with no immediate signals that it was fictional. Its camouflage was meant to emphasise that it was all potentially very real, and everything in it does exist although not in the present Kandos. Perhaps it may yet be the Kandos of the future?