Bundanon Art Museum

Kirsten Thompson AM

It’s no surprise that the various artistic outputs of the Boyd family extended to tapestries too.

Arthur Boyd designed the monumental Great Hall Tapestry, spanning over 9 x 19m, for Parliament House in Canberra in 1988.

Fittingly it was produced by Australian Tapestry Workshop.

It’s a superb rendering, by thread, of one of his renown Shoalhaven landscapes. More specifically of his and his families beloved Bundanon.

Boyd’s environmental activism lead to the establishment of Bundanon Trust in 1993 for its purpose: to foster an appreciation for and understanding of art and environment.

The recent site wide works including the architecture of the new museum invites visitors to compare these imaginary landscapes by Boyd with the one around them.

Arthur’s paintings are interesting to me as a record of a dynamic landscape, always in a state of flux.

Landscapes of change,

Cultural change, Climate change.

Through the process of colonisation in its quest to clear, transform indigenous into pastoral land;

Through the transformation from Yuin Country to land and its natural assets as Commodity;

Through introducing exotics into an endemic ecology,

He records the tensions and environmental disrepair that entails; how in turn these cultural changes contributed to climate change.

The floating cows and burning bushes in his paintings enable us to witness the impact of climatic events in the site’s late history.

But also serve as a warning to our future – in these last 3 years in fact, Bundanon has experienced frequent and extreme climate events - bushfires in 2019-2020 then multiple inundation events in 2022.

Yet inundation and fire is part of this lands’ flows and energies. For millenia this Country – of the Wodi Wodi and Yuin peoples - has been shaped by their ongoing use in which fire and inundation are regenerative and inherent to the land’s natural flows. Organisations like Firesticks continue to manage it, including Bundanon, through cultural burnings, a key means of maintaining health of Country and limiting damage by bushfire.

Care for Country entails not impeding these flows. And acknowledging that fire and water are vital to land health rather than a ‘problem’ to be resisted.

In contrast with much colonial architecture that sought to resist, and in the case of water, divert, channel, re-route and often off-load the supposed problem of excess water to elsewhere.

So as architects for this project we asked:

How might the design of public architecture respond to reduce these impacts of climate change and support the flows of Country?

Bundanon Art Museum and Bridge begins to answer this and offers a case study for how. The design of its new buildings, landscapes and infrastructure for expanded education and art programs is necessarily driven by resilience, resistance and ecological repair, supported by indigenous practices of land management.

It required an important conceptual shift for architecture: from isolated artifact to part of an integrated system encompassing ecology, landscape, infrastructure and architecture. 

And an important reappraisal of landscape from a pictorial to a performative one: our appreciation of landscape as part of a dynamic system rather than mere visual prospect and passive setting for built form. 

This approach necessitated situating the project, its environmental forces within a regional context and thinking well beyond title boundaries which are ineffectual against the spread of flood and fire.

In this landscape The Bridge is inundation resilient, it straddles a wet gully allowing its waters to flow unimpeded below.

By contrast the Museum is fire resistant, embedded within the hill for thermal stability and protection of people and contents within.

A Vegetation and Land Management Plan further supports the flourishing of Country as do partnerships to increase biodiversity, capture carbon & reconnect native habitat; reintroduce the Stuttering Frog; guide the restoration and regeneration of habitats and biospheres particularly the wet gully through the proposal site and riparian landscape to the creek and rivers edge; incorporate Firesticks Alliance Indigenous Corporation cultural burning practices as part of fire and land management.

In these ways Bundanon shifts design thinking about climate adaptation from problem to opportunity to support and connect with Country and repair our climate.

-       Kerstin Thompson AM, speech at the TDPA launch on 26 April 2023

Woven music: the making of Uzton’s ‘Homage to CPE Bach.

Richard Johnson AO

Traditionally, many great architects have had a great understanding and appreciation of the art of tapestry and it’s potential as an integral part of architecture. Jørn Utzon certainly did.

Utzon designed what is now called the Utzon Room at the Sydney Opera House for chamber music, lectures and functions. The room sits within the concrete vaults of the Opera House’s podium, oriented to the harbour setting, a harmony of natural materials and details dominated by a singular work of art: a tapestry, to adjust the acoustics of the space and to add colour, texture, human scale and symbolic meaning.

I recall as Utzon excitedly first explained his idea in Mallorca. He began by talking, not about his design, but how people would experience it, and of the music and art that had inspired his thinking. He wanted a seating arrangement for chamber music with Sydney Harbour as a backdrop, and he needed the wall opposite to be sound absorbing. He understood that in this long room, with a window on the east side and his 14-metre-long tapestry on the west, people would first encounter the work on entry from the south, by promenading down the space.

Utzon was amused to be the artist of the building, creating a work of art about the art performed in the building, as he said, “to express music in a picture”. He drew upon the Hamburg Symphonies by CPE Bach as inspiration for his work. This music, particularly the Symphony No. 3 for Strings in C Major composed in 1773, has a vital and processional nature. As he explained, the composer was most appropriate as CPE Bach was considered by Mozart to be the founder of the symphony.

Utzon also referred to works of art like Raphael’s The Procession to Calvary to gain further useful insights; as he said, “to see what was in it”. He was aware that the work would often be seen through a field of people. Observe how his bold, dark strokes have a human torso scale to them, as well as a processional rhythm. He understood the medium of tapestry; it’s texture, how it would be woven, the direction, the warp and weft, its acoustic qualities and how best to light it.I remember a critical meeting in Hellebæk in 2003, in the beautiful home Utzon designed for his daughter Lin. The meeting was with Jørn, Lin and Grazyna Bleja of the Australian Tapestry Workshop; woven samples, colours, the weave, wool, cotton and metallic threads, the best technique to capture the torn-edge detail of the work, were all discussed. It was a long day, all were tired, but Utzon was energised and overjoyed. Everything had been approved and finalised, with the exception of the gold thread – the explosion of violins, as he liked to refer to the gold shape at the left side of the work. The Workshop had already produced many gold samples, but Utzon was not happy with any of them. He wanted something much brighter than the samples and eventually a colour was found that he was happy with. Most of us considered that gold to be too bright and gaudy for the work. But as you can see now, it works perfectly, and is further proof of his visionary eye.

Lin took Grazyna back to her hotel in town. Utzon was keen to continue the discussion and to show me something. We drove the short distance back to his home where he escorted me through that marvelous living platform of brick, timber and glass, overlooking the forest, to a dining room completely dominated by a large tapestry: a work by Le Corbusier, woven in the 1960s in the great Aubusson workshops. Utzon came very close to the weave and, examining it intently, exclaimed, “There! See that? Ours will be better!”

And it is.

Homage to CPE Bach captures the essence of Bach, the essence of Utzon and the best of the weaver’s art and craft.

This essay was published in the Tapestry Design Prize for Architects 2015 exhibition catalogue and was adapted from a speech given by Richard Johnson AO at the launch of the Prize in the Utzon Room at the Sydney Opera House, 7 October 2014.

Woven space: Architecture and tapestry.

Peter Williams AM

There is a long-standing historical connection between architectural space and textile art, and in particular, tapestry. Rare tapestry remnants have been found in Greece dating from the 3rd century BC and the tapestry-laden walls of European museums and palaces are very familiar to us. The longevity of this art form over the centuries makes my 15-year connection with it via the Australian Tapestry Workshop (ATW) pale into insignificance. Time is not the relevant metric, however, when measuring the alchemy that occurs in the creation of tapestry—this is timeless.

Significant wall hangings have been created around the world and used in a myriad of configurations for functional, decorative, celebratory and didactic purposes, with a clear knowing of their ‘other’ underlying capacity to modify thermal and acoustic conditions within interior built space. Tapestries have ranged from monumental formats in great public and private buildings down to small-scale intimate works for personal enjoyment. Often underpinned by great wealth, they have been traded and presented as gifts to leaders for hundreds of years across countries and societies. They show enormous scope, having been used for traditional designs employing historical and mythical themes, to being utilised as a preferred medium by avant-garde architects and artists at the beginnings of the modern movement in Europe.

From their earliest history to the full integration of textiles into the comprehensive design program of the Bauhaus in Germany under Walter Gropius (1919-28) and later under Mies van der Rohe (1930-33), tapestries have been linked intimately with built space and its creation. One only has to think of the great architect Le Corbusier and his integration of textiles with architecture, including his own masterfully self-designed epic tapestries, to understand the significance of placement in architectural space. William Morris in the 19th century and the contemporary French artist Jean Lurcat paved a way for others to follow, including internationally influential artists such as Picasso, Calder, Leger and Miro, who used the mediums of tapestry and textile as key platforms for their work.

A point to note is that the realisation of the two great tapestries for the new Parliament House and the Sydney Opera House came via collaboration with the ATW. In fact, most of the ATW tapestries are designed with a specific location in mind, and architectural considerations often have a great effect on the designing artists and the weavers when they create a commissioned work. In our Australian context, the architect and enthusiastic champion of integrated art, Aldo Giurgola of Mitchell Giurgola Thorpe, included the monumental Arthur Boyd tapestry Untitled (Shoalhaven Landscape) in the new Parliament House in Canberra. Harry Seidler, European émigré and pioneer Australian modernist architect, included great tapestry works in his local buildings. Jørn Utzon, responsible for the world-acclaimed Sydney Opera House, designed his tapestry Homage to CPE Bach for the Utzon Room in that same building.

Ainsley Murray in her marvelous review of an installation by Sandra Selig at the MCA in 2004 (Artlink magazine vol. 25, #1) wrote perceptively and provocatively about architecture and intervention: “Architecture has long since surrendered the tactile in favour of grander visions. Processes of digitisation, prefabrication and mechanisation have led to the widespread abandonment of the human hand in architectural practice, and private eccentricities are now buried, smoothed over with flatter, more uniform design solutions. Recalcitrant fingerprints and other imperfections have dissolved from all but the vernacular and indigenous architecture of Australasia. The question is, how might we reconsider our relationship with built matter to restore a direct connection with human experience? I suspect the clues lie not in architecture, but in contemporary installation.”

An upcoming design competition promoted by the ATW will reinvigorate this connection between architectural built-form and textile art. It will help to build an awareness of tapestry as a relevant medium that sits comfortably within the materiality of contemporary architectural thinking, providing another tool that architects can draw on in response to this increasingly complex and challenging world. As Ainsley Murray concluded in her article: “Perhaps the handmade in architecture is nothing to do with the physical character of buildings, but entirely to do with how we engage with them in our enlivened and repetitious gestures. Not only is architecture rethought, but the relationship between being and building reconsidered.”

Hear, hear.

Published in the Tapestry Design Prize for Architects 2015 exhibition catalogue.

On translation.

Emeritus Professor Kay Lawrence AM

Tapestry weaving is in some ways a very simple technique; the weft threads are passed over and under a taut warp and packed down so the warp is covered. The weft never passes from edge to edge of the weaving, but can turn anywhere along the warp to build up tiny sections that interlock with other sections rather like a giant jigsaw. But despite its simple structure, the woven medium has the potential to transform designs created in other media into extraordinary artworks. Over the last forty years the weavers at the Australian Tapestry Workshop have developed a distinctive and sophisticated weaving language and unparalleled expertise in translating the work of artists into woven tapestry.

At the ATW, weaving a tapestry is a collaborative process, where the artist works with the weaving team to develop the best possible interpretation of an artwork into tapestry. The founding Director of the ATW, Sue Walker likened this process to an orchestra’s interpretation of a musical score, with the added advantage at the ATW (to continue the analogy), of being able to develop the interpretation in discussion with the composer. A musical score can take many forms; it can be a detailed musical notation, or at the other end of the spectrum (like some of the works of John Cage) merely a set of instructions, relying on the expertise and skills of the conductor and orchestra to transform these instructions into music. The translation process in tapestry weaving has the same range.

In the 1970s weavers at the Dovecot Tapestry Studio in Edinburgh Scotland, when tapestry weaver Archie Brennan was Director, worked to a set of instructions provided by artist Tom Phillips to create a tapestry, where a major part of the work, a wide border of vertical stripes (but woven horizontally) was dictated by chance. The width and colour of each stripe was determined by yarn left on the bobbins each day from weaving other commissioned tapestries. This process resulted in unforeseen and often serendipitous colour combinations that gave vibrancy to the completed work. In contrast, John Wardle Architect’s tapestry design, joint winner of the inaugural Tapestry Design Prize for Architects in 2015, was created digitally as a detailed colour notation of space where swathes of luminous colour suggested light filled volumes. Now being woven at many times the size of the original (if such a term can be used for a digital image) the challenge has been for the weavers to create the illusion of scintillating colour-filled space in the dense, woven materiality of tapestry.

In both these examples, the quality of the translation of artwork into tapestry, whether from a set of instructions or a visual image, has been dependent upon developing a relationship of trust and open discussion between the artists and weaving team. An open exchange of ideas is crucial in enabling the weavers to translate the artwork into the language of weaving and give life to the artist’s intentions. The weavers bring to this process their expertise and knowledge of materials, the colour, lustre and density of different yarns, and their understanding of how the gridded structure of weaving can be used to heighten the impact and resonance of an artwork.

Weaving a tapestry has been likened to building a brick wall built up section by section from bottom to top where you can’t go back and fix a mistake at the bottom when you’re near the top without dismantling the whole thing. Such processes require a particular kind of thinking; being able to anticipate how what has been woven and is being woven relates to what will be woven. Archie Brennan famously referred to this aspect of the process when he said, ’tapestry weaving is like life. You can’t take back what you did yesterday, but you can modify it by what you do today’. This is at the heart of the process of weaving tapestry; decisions taken hour by hour, day by day, each row of weft building on what has been woven before, accumulate to construct the tapestry through an open-ended process of creation. Craftsman David Pye has described such a process as using a ‘workmanship of risk’ where the ‘quality of the result is not pre-determined but dependent on judgement, dexterity and care’. It’s the productive tension generated by taking such risks that underpins the weaving process at the Australian Tapestry Workshop and makes weaving every tapestry a journey into unknown territory.

Translating a design into tapestry begins with discussion between weavers and artist about the artwork itself, the ideas the artist wants the work to communicate, and the context in which the work will be hung. The weavers need to clearly understand the artist’s intentions, as well as the relationship of the tapestry to the space in which it will be hung and how it will be experienced, whether in an intimate space to be seen close up, or in a large space, perhaps high on a wall, to be viewed from a distance. All these aspects are taken into account when deciding just how the tapestry is to be woven.

Before work begins a series of samples are woven to determine the warp setting (the fineness or coarseness of the weave), the colour palette, and to experiment with different ways of weaving particular aspects of the design. This stage is essential as it enables the weavers and artist to make a series of informed decisions about how the translation should be undertaken before work on the actual tapestry begins. In the Wardle tapestry for example, samples were woven to show different ways of achieving the scintillating quality of the light that characterised the design, through the way threads of different colour and tone were mixed on the bobbin. Artists are invariably amazed at the transformation of their artwork as it is translated into tapestry and takes on the particular qualities of the woven medium; the richness and depth of colour and the tactile density of the weave evident at close quarters but with the capacity to suddenly leap into focus as an image when standing back.

Tapestry is a magical medium. It’s about transformation, not just artwork transformed into weaving, but the way the participants, artists and weavers are also changed through the collaborative process of creation itself.

Published in the Tapestry Design Prize for Architects 2016 exhibition catalogue.