STEM in Public Art
Key Idea 1: Relationships

Key themes: Place, environment, First Nations art, digital art, public space

Key STEM dimensions: Patterns, Systems, Relationships
This commission draws on dormant cultural knowledge and encourages people to connect to Country in the city. It brings people together, encouraging relationships in a reflective space. It acknowledges the patterns of life – past, present and future. These patterns are expressed using a digital system to create a hypnotic rhythm of four lush bushland scenes.

Artwork context
Maree Clarke is a Yorta Yorta/Wamba Wamba/Mutti Mutti/Boonwurrung woman who grew up in North West Victoria, Mildura, on the banks of the Murray River. Maree has been a practising artist living and working in Melbourne for the last three decades.

Clarke is known for her open and collaborative approach to cultural practice. She consistently works in intergenerational collaboration to revive dormant cultural knowledge and uses technology to bring new audiences to contemporary southeast Aboriginal arts. Maree Clarke has exhibited widely both nationally and internationally and was awarded the prestigious 2023 Yalingwa Fellowship, recognising her outstanding contribution to First Peoples creative practice. The fellowship is awarded every two years to a South Eastern Australian First Nations artist at a critical stage in their career, presented in partnership with the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art (ACCA) and TarraWarra Museum of Art.

Clarke’s practice incorporates multimedia installations using photography in the form of lenticular prints, video, 3D photographs and holograms as well as painting and sculpture. Her works explore ceremonies, rituals and language of her ancestors and realise her long held ambitions to facilitate cross-cultural dialogue on the ongoing effects of colonisation.

Barerarerungar is a commission situated inside the 101 Collins Street building, featuring photography and video installation. The work creates an immersive and reflective space for people to slow down and connect with Country in the heart of the city. Encompassing nine vertically positioned digital screens, Barerarerungar displays four chapters with footage from Brisbane Ranges, Timbertop, Cape Schanck and Sherbrooke Forest. The screens alternate between overhead and close-up footage of lush bushland scenes in colour and black-and-white which symmetrically fold into one another in a hypnotic rhythm. 

‘My work has a quality of timelessness, using new technologies to tell stories of past, present, and future. I would like people entering and exiting this part of the building to not just think about what they are doing and where they are going but what has been before and where they could go. Barerarerungar is representative of the five clans of the Kulin Nation.’ Maree Clarke  2023 (101 Collins street, Ground Floor Evolution)

Inquiry questions

• What is public space?
• This work is positioned inside the Collins Building 101. Do you think it is still public art? Form an argument for or against.
• Who do you think is the intended audience? 
• How might this work connect with First Nations scientific practices?
• How does the artist’s use of digital technologies connect to ideas expressed in the work? 

Activity
Research an area in Australia which is significantly impacted by climate change and/or sustainability concerns. Source 2 – 8 photographs online relating to this place, selecting pictorial and aerial views of the landscape or environmental impacts, as well as imagery of cultural practices and the people who live in the area.

Use Photoshop to layer and transform your images, acknowledging the First Nations, original custodians of the specific area and transforming photos into mirrored, symmetrical patterns. Consider how this conglomeration and symmetry changes your visual perspective of the scenes, audiences’ reception of the photographs, their original meanings. 

Use this visual product to consider new, creative solutions and responses to environmental problems and/or sustainability concerns.

Extension
Reflect on geometric qualities of your designs, measuring and comparing angles and shapes.

STEM dimensions in this activity include:
Patterns – Photos are transformed into mirrored symmetrical patterns.
Systems – Photoshop is applied to layer and transform images.
Relationships – Areas affected by climate change or sustainability are researched

Maree Clarke STEM Victorian Curriculum links 

Key Themes: Changing tastes; public art as city branding

Key STEM dimensions: Relationships, Patterns, Models and Modelling
This sculpture draws on strong cultural connections and our relationship to it has changed over time as contemporary ideas have changed. This change has seen it move location and find a home that connects to our First Nations roots, Birrarung Marr. The surface of the sculpture is patterned with ceramic tiles, colour and imagery and Halpern has created the sculpture by modelling clay and cement. Its appearance and style reflects trends of its time and its new location gives it new life.

Artwork context
Deborah Halpern was commissioned to create Angel to celebrate Australia’s bicentenary in 1988, which marked two-hundred years since the beginning of colonisation and invasion. Angel was initially installed in 1989 in the moat in front of the National Gallery of Victoria International, but in 1996 it was relocated to Birrarung Marr as part of the renovation of the NGV International by Italian architect Mario Bellini.

Artworks like Angel tend to feel permanent because they are so heavy and massively large. However, when fashions change certain styles of art can appear out of sync with contemporary ideas and trends, and this cultural force can result in major adjustments. Angel is typical of Halpern’s exuberantly colourful, cartoonish and frequently joyful artistic style. This style is associated with the Australian visual culture of the early 1980s to mid-1990s, encapsulated by the fashion of Jenny Kee, art of Ken Done and architecture of Peter Corrigan.

In this instance the authorities in charge of the NGV International chose to move Angel, perhaps due to tourism and the need to project a contemporary image. If a cultural institution (like the NGV) appears to be out of step with the latest in contemporary art, design and fashion, it can appear as a less desirable tourist destination. We do not know for sure, but it is reasonable to guess that the desire to appear up-to-date was the motivation for both the NGV renovation and the relocation of Angel.

The image-aware emphasis on regular change and rejuvenation of public artworks has both critics and champions. Critics argue that the upshot of changing to suit fashion and innovation is that public artworks are not allowed the opportunity to become historical and relevant across generations of citizens. Conversely, champions are optimistic that change can be positive for public artworks. Melbourne art critic Mark Holsworth reflected on both positions when he mused:

“Have they (Deborah Halpern’s public artworks) now fallen from favour as tastes change? Or do their new locations give them new life?”

Inquiry questions:

• How do you think seeing Angel at the entrance of the NGV International would influence visitors’ expectations of the art inside?
• Speculate and analyse the reasons behind the decision to remove Angel from the front of the NGV and relocate to Birrarung Marr. 

• What materials and techniques do you think have been used to create Angel? 
• What design and engineering strategies may have been used to ensure the strength and durability of this large scale, outdoor sculpture?

Activity
In small groups or individually, choose a work of public art in your community – perhaps a sculpture at your school, a memorial or a fountain. Create a project plan to explain how you would relocate this artwork to another location. This might be for practical reasons – or maybe to have fun placing an artwork in a pool, in a playground, or upside-down!

Include people you would consult and work with, communications as well as equipment to move and safely reinstall the work.

As part of your project proposal, create a labelled map to communicate the new location of the artwork with considerations such as public interaction, lines of sight from select locations, sun, shadow and reflection. Make a model of the sculpture in its new location, or use digital modelling software such as Sketch Up.

STEM dimensions in this activity:
Models and modelling – making a model of an existing sculpture in its surrounding environment
Relationships – communicating with relevant people to move and reinstall a sculpture
Patterns/systems – creation of a map to show the sculpture’s new location

Deborah Halpern STEM Victorian Curriculum links

Key Themes: Influences, shared history, contemporary

Key STEM dimensions: Systems, Relationships, Structure and Function
These three large photographic images on billboards are influenced by our history and identity and explore our relationships to people and to China. The creative process has transformed the structure and form of the Vault (1980) artwork from a sculpture into a large photographic image that connects to two other photographs that draw on Lim’s relationship with her parents. The artwork is structured and situated as a public billboard or sign, and so functions as an advertisement. 

Artwork context
Eugenia Lim is an Australian artist of Chinese-Singaporean descent who works across the body, photography, social and spatial practice to explore themes of national identity, migration, technology and ethics. Often a performer within her works, Lim invents personas to explore the tensions of the individual within society – the alienation and belonging in a globalised world. 

Yellow Peril Revisited is a reimagined series of large photographic images and text across three large-scale billboards situated on and around the Gold Leaf restaurant in Preston. This is an installation based on the first iteration of Yellow Peril (2015) which comprised video, prints and sculpture. 

Both works explore the impact of mining and immigration on Australian identity, reclaiming the racist term ‘yellow peril’ used in reference to a fear of Asian immigration as well as derogatory responses to Ron Robertson-Swann’s infamous public artwork, Vault (1980). Vault was highly controversial at its time of installation in central Melbourne, such that it was relocated near ACCA and has since become a key public artwork and influenced the visual language of Melbourne city. Lim draws on Vault in many works such as The Australian Ugliness (2018) in which she performed with a bracelet maquette of Vault which also featured in ACCA’s exhibition Who’s Afraid of Public Space? in 2021-22. Like many temporary and performance works it can only be experienced in photographs.

Yellow Peril includes an archival snapshot of the artist’s parents in front of Swann’s sculpture, creating a synchronistic starting point for Lim’s performative and playful work. The work spans timescales within the settler-colonial history of Australia: an image of Lim’s parents as hopeful ‘new Australians’ sits in dialogue with a panoramic photo of Lim as a gold Mao-suited ‘Ambassador’ sent back in time to the goldfields of the 1850s (photographed in 2020, Sovereign Hill). The ‘Ambassador’ is holding a large replica gold nugget based on ‘Welcome Stranger’, the world’s largest alluvial nugget found in 1869 in Moliagul, Victoria. 

Inspired by the observational comedy of Jacques Tati’s 1967 film Playtime and Lim’s research into Chinese migration, diaspora and the White Australia Policy, Yellow Peril Revisited considers the evolving dynamics between Australia and China. The work highlights the interconnected nature of our socio-economic future, while unearthing lesser-known personal and political histories of Australia.

Inquiry questions

• Imagine encountering this installation while walking down the street. Without knowing it is an artwork, what might you think and feel? 
• In pairs, generate arguments for or against why passers-by might consider this a) an artwork or b) an advertisement. In your argument, consider form and function. 
• This work is ephemeral, meaning it will change and disappear over time. Imagine encountering this artwork 30 years from now. How might the work have changed?
• How do you think the society of 2050 will interpret the work?

Activity
Work in groups to create a plan for a website on public art, where users can submit and share information on public artworks. Consider information sharing, how to evaluate data, temporary or ephemeral works, criteria and processes to determine whether a submission is an artwork. Consider user experience such as interactivity, maps and interface.

STEM dimensions in this activity:
Systems – A website on public art is created where users can share information.
Structure and function – determining whether ephemeral or temporary pieces are artworks or not. 

Eugenia Lim STEM Victorian Curriculum Links

Historical context
Link to more information about Ron Robertson-Swann’s public artwork, Vault (1980)