Tracey Thredbo: Exhibited at Dancehouse, Melbourne, Australia 2010
Tracey Thredbo tested experiential qualities of a liberating mind, spirit, body with space, place and architecture with the construction of a tessellating and disembodying installation structure. This experience informed a unique cross-disciplinary narrative between an architect and choreographer by experimenting with human movement, built form with the trajectory of designing interactive ‘liberating’ spaces. A suspended ceiling structure was crafted from 318 cardboard archive boxes and performatively distorted via a series of climatic energy simulations above an unsuspecting audience. The architecturally designed ceiling was processed through a performative and choreographic theatrical narration. Audience members were invited to participate by resting underneath while the contracting and tessellating ceiling structure reconfigured above through a complex design system of articulating ropes and pulleys. Each contraction simulated an ominous ‘disaster’ presence of the cyclone, earthquake, landslide and simultaneously alluding to spiritual assertions, confinement and ‘other’. The ceiling was designed and handcrafted using low cost and ‘ordinary’ construction materials including cardboard boxes, conduit piping, nylons, roping, pulleys and cables sourced from recycle centres and various hardware outlets.
Mojave Landing: Performance, Mojave Desert, California, USA, 2012
A performative installation in the Mojave Desert to test the mesmerising geometries of The Integratron by replicating them on the desert floor. Armed with ‘marking’ materials of pegs, reflectors and builders line sourced from a local Home Depot a radial landing site was assembled in an attempt to communicate with the supposed aliens. And the aliens did arrive in the form of a ‘desert-rat’ - a menacing alien appearing from nowhere on trail bike with tattoos and rifle. The surreal experience was amplified with the desert-rat circumnavigating the landing site with doughnuts and burnouts. This important and dubious moment was at once conceptually compelling for the project and near-death terrifying. The Integratron is a small architecturally considered project built in the 1950s by unusual means to communicate with aliens. Yes aliens. Apparently its builder had an encounter with extra-terrestrials who gave him blueprints to construct a perfectly composed dome, both acoustically and aesthetically, with a central oculus and sixteen radial apertures.
Future Wagon: Performance, Caulfield South/ exhibited at the NGV 2013
Future Wagon envisions a nomadic home of tomorrow. This is not a high-tech caravan project for a family of four rather the pursuit of an anachronistic and ‘unidentifiable’ symbol on wheels. The project speculates upon our future inhabitant’s roaming street address and value of material decor. Where will we live, and what will our homes look like? The outcome is constructed from ‘do-it-yourself’ materials and amalgamates numerous wandering references from stagecoaches of the wild west, gypsy caravans, regal carriages, Buckminster Fuller’s dymaxion car to homemade billycarts and shopping trolleys of the homeless. Materials: powder coated steel pipes, galvanised steel ‘guinea-pig’ wire mesh, trapezium white reflectors, cuttings of clear PVC carpet matting, skylight domes, multipurpose plumbing hose, clear shower curtain rings, nylon white cable ties, true blue garden hose, cobweb brooms and moving trolleys.
Embassy: Exhibited at Pin-Up Architecture and Design Project Space, Collingwood, Australia, 2014
Embassy brings together experimental architecture, design, performance and a commitment to an evolution of research practice. Embassy is inspired by the notion of the object itself and how it can be deposited outside its usual static context. The project itself feels incomplete – deliberately so. An intriguing quartet of panel garage doors is held in unison by a robust, workmanlike timber frame yet lifted out of the ordinary via its glossy ‘skin’ of stark white paint. The installation appears as a set of contradictions: a pure, modernist form and, at the same time, a commentary on the Australian suburb and a celebration of the banal. A conceptual trigger point for Embassy was the rigorous choreography and the explosive energy release of a rocket ship launch. However, Embassy appears as an intervention more in the spirit of Martin Creed where the probability of action is the choreography of everyday occurrence rather than a single, phenomenal moment. Nevertheless, there is a tension that is building here in the instinctual knowledge that the doors will move – spreading and reaching, the multiple layers and openings create an intriguing interstitial space. The entrance and exit sequence alludes to an experience of liminality… a threshold to be crossed into an ambiguous space. Once closed, those outside the object are immediately excluded – what lies within? The blunt, highly reflective whiteness of the doors sits in high contrast to the blank, gritty backdrop of the Pin-up warehouse. These two opposing elements sit uneasily together– something seems amiss… in a moment of Hitchcock suspense we wait for what will happen next...