about an hour away from melb is werribee. werribee is the brunt of many jokes because it’s very suburban and it’s where melbourne’s sewage plant is.
but it’s also the home of the werribee mansion and the open range zoo so it’s worth checking out.
every year the grounds of the mansion hosts the helen lempriere sculpture awards. it’s become a bit of a fall tradition for me (like apple picking). clare, lou & i went last saturday but once there i realised my camera battery was dead. ;(
my fav this year was called ‘domestic disturbance’ (1st column, 5 down if you click the link above). it was probably 30 sheets of heavy acrylic stacked up in a row about 2 inches from each other. each piece had holes drilled in… seemingly random. until you started walking around the thing & getting on different angles. that’s when you could see the outline of a couch, a table & even a cat.
the big wooden balls (row 3, 5 down) were exceptionally cool from a construction point of view. there was a bit pole in the middle of the ball & then pieces of firewood were tied to the pole with wire to create the ball. must have taken ages!
i also liked ‘happy ending’ (row 1, down4) – the smiling gravestone – and herbaceous(row 1, 3 down) which was pieces of rusty steel that looked sort of like dandelions. you could walk thru them & make them sway. the winning sculpture was meniscii (4th row, top pix) which were big rounded mirrored domes sitting on the ground. not all that exciting until you looked in & watched the sky, clouds & tree branches above you.