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latest assignment for Big hART has been to design
a visual identity, user-generated website and a travelling
exhibition for GOLD, a multi-disciplinary arts project
based in Griffith, NSW. GOLD engages young people and
isolated communities around the Murray-Darling Basin to
help create behavioural change in the use of water.
In October 2007 we curated an exhibition at the Griffith
Regional Art Gallery showcasing the work of GOLD thus
far, featuring a 'lab' in the centre of the gallery
(run by young people participating in the project),
video projections, audio recordings, and a collection
of photographs printed as a short-run newspaper. The
exhibition has since travelled to a farm at Boree Creek
and Trundle Hotel, and is soon to land at the Qantas
Lounge in Sydney Airport.
A website, weblog and forum is currently being developed
as an online space for young people to workshop audio-visual
material, farming communities to discuss issues around
water use and climate change, and eventually for global
audiences to contribute their own content and responses.
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The GOLD Lab installed in the Griffith Regional Art Gallery |
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I nstallation detail, Griffith Regional Art Gallery |
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Some of the photos and quotes rendered on newsprint producing
mini-newspapers presenting the project |
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Early in 2007 we made
our first trip to Griffith, where we conducted a workshop
with young people to help develop components of the logo and
website using photography and digital manipulation techniques.
Our logo design is based around a central “O”
showing individual Gold participants reflected in water. Every
time the logo appears, the “O” is represented
by a different image, drawn from a growing collection of photographs
taken by participants themselves, in and around Griffith and
other key Gold sites. |
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dynamic logo ‘schema’ was conceived of as a
way of engaging participants directly with the visual representation
of the Gold project. It also enables the logo to reflect
the diversity of individuals, perspectives and stories that
make up this unique project.
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Reflections of people in water were chosen to visualise the
project’s aim of encouraging audiences to look at water
(and at the Gold participants) in a new light, that is, as
a precious and undervalued resource. Water here is presented
as something tangible and immediate, responsive to human intervention
(fingers rippling the surface) and evoking the alchemy of
distortion and transformation.
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