Blue Jay Way

With Blue Jay Way I set out to evoke both the cultural and natural context of two ‘sacred sites’ of Australian modernism – Heide Museum of Modern Art and Penrith Regional Gallery.

The work included one hundred perforated blue plastic buckets: fifty inscribed with the titles of Beatles’ songs, fifty with the phonetic denotations of particular birdcalls. At Heide the buckets were attached to trees and stacked into columns around the gardens and courtyards of Heide II gallery. In Penrith they were stacked into columns in a courtyard outside Anchor House Gallery.

In the galleries themselves I exhibited cyanotype photograms of various objects: plants (virginia creeper, lavender, leaves, grasses);  garden-related textiles like netting and hessian; bamboo blinds; and perforated buckets.

My research entailed fossicking through cultural and biographical documents, including the mythologised narratives of both sites. Equally important were the the sensations evoked by both places, drawn from times spent physically immersed in their sounds and sights. 

Blue Jay Way was exhibited at Heide Museum of Modern Art , Melbourne, and Penrith Regional Gallery, Emu Plains, NSW.