08:
Make-do Garden City is up and running, with our starter crop of eggplant, okra, chilli, lemongrass, spinach, various lettuces etc. all doing remarkably well in their greenhouse-shopfront. In the Do Garden, the lotus is dying back for winter but still making an effort to look lovely. We’ve begun unpacking furniture and other assorted things from our cart so conversations can soon get underway there.
There’s a workshop/event happening this Saturday 11am – 1pm, a good time to come down if you haven’t yet visited. It’s going to be a fairly loose affair involving tea and talking, with drawing and seed-swapping on the side. Feel free to bring along your own edible plants, or seeds, and/or drawing materials (although rice paper and ink will be provided).
Here’s how it looked at the beginning:
and some details
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Stay tuned for more images next week.
Photos by Arunas / Tessa Zettel & Karl Khoe
21:
Our new solo exhibition at 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art opens this Thursday. It will be evolving for the next six weeks, so please do drop by later and see where it ends up travelling to – more details below:
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TESSA ZETTEL & KARL KHOE
MAKE-DO GARDEN CITY
4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art
181 – 187 Hay St. Sydney
26 March – 8 May 2010 / Open Tues – Sat, 11am – 6pm
Opening Thursday 25 March, 6 – 8pm
4A’s ground floor turns into Make-do Garden City, a place where fictional Chinese gardens of the seventeenth century meet with the personal histories and potential sustainable futures of Sydney’s Chinatown. Tessa Zettel & Karl Khoe will be conducting a six-week program of talking, making and growing that explores new ways of remembering and recreating the city around us.
Members of the local community are invited in to contribute stories of gardens – real, past or imagined – in exchange for edible plants grown by the artists. As conversations unfold throughout the exhibition, the artists will produce a series of experimental domestic micro-farms that respond to the places and ideas being discussed. This timely project investigates what it means to live in this city in the context of urban expansion, climate change and food crisis.
Visit Make-do Garden City for a chance to catch the artists tending their installation, or join them for one of two informal workshops involving seed-swapping, drawing, tea and conversation.
Public Programs:
Saturday, 10th April, 11am – 1pm
& Saturday, 8th May, 11am – 1pm (Closing event)
www.4a.com.au
www.makeshift.com.au
Make-do Garden City has been assisted by the Australian Government through the Australia Council, its arts funding and advisory body.
20:
Some little things we made during a recent 3-week residency at Bundanon can be seen for the next few days only at Gallery 4A. It’s part of the 2009 Annual Members’ Exhibition, which runs until Thursday, December 24. More pictures of these (and other) works to come soon.
IMAGE CREDIT:
Tessa Rapaport & Karl Logge
The small worlds that keep us, 2009
oil on cycad seeds, bone, branch, mushroom. lichen
(… in the studio at Bundanon)
photo by Tessa Rapaport & Karl Logge
21:
Some drawings we made during our FraserStudios residency some months ago have been brought to light in a new form, and are currently on show at NG Art Gallery as part of the group exhibition Underground to Aboveground – Part 2. It runs for just a few days, until Saturday 24 Oct.
Other artists include Stephen Benwell, Drew Bickford, Louisa Dawson, Keg De Souza, Karina Keys, Ryan Leech, Ben Morley, Kate O’Connor, Grant Stevens and David Wills.
NG Art Gallery
3 Little Queen St. Chippendale
Open 11am – 10pm
Tessa Rapaport & Karl Logge
City in flight (Their clockwork and their merchandise)
2009
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City in flight (Dissolves, and pavements drift away)
2009
13:
2 pieces of makeshift news this week:
1. We’re the current resident artists at the Lock-Up in Newcastle, and will be living and working here until Tuesday the 22nd of Sept, so please drop by if you’re in the area.
2. We’re also part of a group show called Breathing Space happening at the Hawkesbury Regional Gallery, which opens on Friday the 18th of Sept. It runs until the 25th of October.
25:
We have some work in an exhibition opening next week, it’s the NAVA Freedman Foundation Awards Exhibition 2009 and is being held at COFAspace. Yes indeed, we are heading off into the big wide yonder on a travelling scholarship (although not for a little while yet…). Other exhibiting artists include Bridget Currie, Katya Grohovsky, Izabela Pluta, Keg de Souza, Laura Woodward, Louise Irving and Kenzie Larsen.
All welcome, opening night is Wednesday 2 Sept, 6 – 8pm.
Freedman Foundation Awards Exhibition 2009
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3 – 11 September, 2009
10am – 5pm Monday to Saturday
COFAspace
College of Fine Arts
Cnr Oxford St & Greens Rd
Paddington NSW
9385 0684
Image: Laura Woodward
28:
A new version of Book Case will appear next week (4 – 7 Sept) in the CarriageWorks Arts Centre foyer (245 Wilson St. Eveleigh) as part of Performance Space’s LiveWorks event. It’s called Notes on the Art and Manner of (Dis)arranging one’s books, which comes from a piece by our favourite writer, Georges Perec. Here’s the blurb:
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“1. 4. Things which aren’t books but are often met with in libraries
Photographs in gilded brass frames, small engravings, pen and ink drawings, dried flowers in stemmed glasses, matchbox-holders containing (or not), chemical matches (dangerous), lead soldiers, a photograph of Ernst Renan in his study at the College de France, postcards, dolls’ eyes, tins, packets of salt, pepper and mustard from Lufthansa, letter-scales, picture hooks, marbles, pipe-cleaners, scale models of vintage cars, multicoloured pebbles and gravel, ex-votos, springs.” PEREC
Book Case is a temporary public reading room that travels in a suitcase (or two). Its collection has in the past consisted of short-format reading material – anthologies, essays, short stories, zines etc. – that changes according to each new location in appears in. On this occasion Book Case contains books owned and used by the artists themselves, who will be inhabiting the room upstairs during LiveWorks to conduct experiments in ‘releasing’ selected portions of text from their books into the surrounding space.
Please visit the artists’ reading room via the staircase around the corner
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Will post more details soon. Hope to see you there!
27:
Today’s Metro in the Sydney Morning Herald has a feature on Underbelly, which includes a little on The Hanging Gardens and a few quotes from our good selves. You can read the full article online here
19:
Do you have a potted friend that means something special to you? Perhaps a hanging succulent that’s followed you from one home to the next? Would you like your plant’s story to be part of a new project about these often overlooked neighbours? … If you also live in or around Redfern (in Sydney’s Inner West) then we’d love to hear from you.
Our latest undertaking, The Hanging Gardens & Other Tales, is a site-specific installation at CarriageWorks made up of pot plants on loan from local residents, produced in collaboration with Nobody as part of the Underbelly Public Arts Lab + Festival. Your green friends can be delivered from June 30th onwards, and will be carefully looked after until the 14th of July when they can return home. We’d also like each plant to be accompanied by a short letter of introduction from its owner, sharing a little something of its history or personal significance to you (handwritten notes are most welcome).
If you are interested or have any questions please email: hanginggardens@makeshift.com.au
http://hanginggardens.wordpress.com
29:
This week we’re heading down to Melbourne to start working on En Plein Air, which will be part of the 2008 Next Wave Festival (15th – 31st of May). For the next 3 weeks we’ll be artists-in-residence at the Gardens, developing an installation for Magnet House, making solar etchings, and drawing and collecting stories throughout the grounds. If you’re in Melbourne and would like to have a conversation with us about plants or the Gardens in general, feel free to drop by and say hello.
Read about the project on our site
Find out more about the 2008 Next Wave Festival
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