Botanic + Biennale
August 30, 2010 – 10:10 amThe 17th Sydney Biennale was on when I visited the Royal Botanic Gardens. As part of the show the Garden played host to a couple of artworks on the theme of threatened and threatening nature.
Choi Jeong Hwa from Seoul presented ‘The unbearable lightness of being’. This floating lotus blossom made me smile and reminded me of Tim Watkin’s kinetic sculptures.
Too bad the fountain was on – it’s competing for attention. But colour choice for the flower is brilliant.
The following shots are of Sydney-born artist Fiona Hall’s installation ‘The Barbarians at the Gate’. She painted beehives with military camouflage patterns associated with different countries and then sited the hives at the Gardens as foreign objects “analogous to the shipping in of people during early colonial times”. The camouflage worked really well. The installation was subtle and sited really well close to one of the Garden gates.
Each hive also had a special roof to reference the country it represents. The result is meant to illustrate ‘a colonial-era nation building process of introducing people, plants and animals into foreign habitats forever changing the ecology of a place’. The site is also marked by a low sandbag edging, totally in keeping with the idea of defending against an invader. I’m glad I had a chance to see the pieces – they helped make the massive scale of the Gardens more human and friendly.
