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

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

Hmmm… pages currently don’t seem to be working on this somewhat temperamental blog, so here are our contact details

Makeshift can be contacted by email: mailbox {at} makeshift {dot} com {dot} au
or by phone: +411 873 322
and can be found on the web at: www.makeshift.com.au

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

by Tessa Rapaport

1.The Lively Plane
Lisa Kelly & Dennis Tan
15 February - 1 March 2008
Institute of Contemporary Art Newtown, Sydney

Inside a small room with white walls and polished timber floors, a plane tree sprouts snug and unassuming from one corner of a raised wooden platform, its top leaves flattened awkwardly against an indifferent ceiling. Also on the platform is a woven mat, a “domestic space differentiated from the wilderness”(1), placed neatly under the shade one imagines might be cast if this tableau were not in fact indoors, The titles of these works (for they are, as it turns out, discrete works by two separate artists), No Street Tree… and Working title: Private space on constructed space on Institutional space suggest two things that lie at the heart of the objects and actions unfolding from this exhibition: the multi-layered and contingent nature of urban space, and the artistic processes used in interrogating and intervening in that space.

These concerns tend to fold in and over each other at different points throughout the exhibition, the product of a loose collaboration between Sydney artist Lisa Kelly and Dennis Tan, visiting from Singapore. Tan’s month-long residency at ICAN has resulted in a series of thoughtful gestures that respond to phenomena and relations observed by the artists in various urban contexts. As if to prevent an unsightly sag or sudden movement, Kelly’s displaced tree is bound tightly by jute straps stretching taut across the room to uprooted timber stakes leant against the wall. Miniature sandbags bearing images of saplings constrained/supported in the same way, tree prop (circle) and tree prop (triangle), hold open wide, heavy doors. Nonetheless, 1.The Lively Plane manages to quietly evade the gallery space, tumbling gently into the surrounding streetscape in both a literal and figurative sense.

There are multiple perforations and lines of dialogue at work in this exhibition, between the two artists, between the art and the site, between the inside and outside of the gallery. These are traced over with lines of sight, as the room designated ‘institutional space’ opens directly onto the shared living space of an inner-city street … rows of terraces, a café, passing cyclists and a solitary police car, cruising. On this languorous Sunday, a doorstep lined with worn tiles acts as a cosy border zone, a kind of pivot point around which everything else turns. It is where one of the artists sits talking to visitors who engage with the works without necessarily entering the gallery, and affords a view of both the ‘lively plane’ inside and the footpath rolling away with its own broad, sweeping trees straining their allotted concrete plots.

A handful of unauthorised but plausibly ‘useful’ objects have also landed surreptitiously on this patch of cement - besser blocks containing sand, plants and cigarette butts (Kelly’s ashtray and ashtray - - planter); and a chair with one shortened leg propped up by the doorstep, itself supporting a similarly incapacitated stool that suggests something of an alternate, tiered escape route (Tan’s Lean on). In Diagram (Concrete cover), Tan has inscribed diagrams on the gallery window for a proposed guerrilla amendment to the pavement architecture below, its otherwise unobtrusive ‘telecom cover’ tipped at a jaunty angle. Facing the window here, it is possible to see at once the reflection of the street, the imagined intervention, and the urban (re)constructions inside.

In many ways these works have a tendency to “melt into, and out of, the site – not as an art form but as an event, and as a trajectory for events” (2). The actions they describe have a subversive play about them, as well as a more serious engagement with the politicisation and regulation of public space. Salvaged timber from the nearby CarriageWorks development is recast as raw material; the tree it supports is a species widely loathed for its fluffy seed. As a collection of unstable and interdependent artefacts in conversation with the spaces they occupy, the exhibition creates room for unexpected urban encounters and more fluid modes of art practice - a plane of lively possibilities indeed.

Notes
1. Mikesch Muecke ‘Food to go: the industrialization of the picnic’ in Eating Architecture, eds. Jamie Horowitz & Paulette Singley, MIT, Massachusetts 2004, p. 232

2. Vito Acconci ‘Vito Acconci/Acconci Studio’ in (The world may be) Fantastic: 2002 Biennale of Sydney, ed. Ewen McDonald, the Biennale of Sydney, Sydney 2002, p. 17

Lisa Kelly’s website - www.studiononstop.net

Image Credits
TOP LEFT: Dennis Tan Diagram (platform) 2008, white paint marker on window
TOP RIGHT: Dennis Tan Working title: Private space on constructed space on institutional space 2008, found recycled timber from CarriageWorks and ICAN, roofing spans, nails / Lisa Kelly No Street Tree… 2008, plane tree, jute strap, timber, linen thread, hardware
BOTTOM MIDDLE: Dennis Tan Lean on 2008, chair, stool, nails
BOTTOM RIGHT: Lisa Kelly ashtray - - planter 2008, besser block, Sydney sand, soil, rubbish plant, cigarette butts, rubber, tape, hardware

All photographs taken by the author

Makeshift in the ether now has a blog. Its purpose is to provide interested parties with a more or less regular commentary on our work and movements. We also plan to use it as a space in which to develop our respective and collaborative writing practices, so it should end up containing a smattering of critical and creative responses to exhibitions, objects and ideas that we encounter along the way.