Wright’s Welsh-born grandfather was highly regarded landscape painter and academic Gareth Morse, who used the shed as a studio, and whose walls he used as both diary and a journal, etching the aphorism in his native tongue that supplies the show’s subtitle, Heddwch A Tawelu Yma (”peace and quiet here”).
The sight of the late artist’s shed sitting in the middle of the iconic Freo beach is surreal. But once inside you’re enveloped by the comfort of familiar beach images and the place where an artist reflected on his life and the sanctuary he found in Australia.
The Pool of Content exhibition at Fremantle Biennale. Credit: Adam Kenna
Keep walking along Bathers Beach and turn toward town, and you will come to the Moores Building and the installation Fifty Thousand Years, Or For As Long As We Remember, in which Sri Lankan-born Raki Nikahetiya invites visitors to tread the earth that literally contains the voices of eight West Australians who reflect on the meaning of home, identity and collective memory.
Nikahetiya’s piece, which invites visitors to put our ears to the red earth, is a timely reminder that the fabric of our world contains the traces of millions of stories of displacement, exile and sanctuary.
Next stop on the Biennale odyssey was Old Customs House on Phillimore Street for a visually striking piece in which Wona Bae and Charlie Lawler contemplate a world in which humans have disappeared, yet life continues to thrive.
Loading
In Pool of Content, the Melbourne-based duo have created a work inspired by WA’s pink lakes, which get their gorgeous candy-coloured hue because of the activity of microorganisms. In other words, life continues to flourish in a hyper-saline environment totally inhospitable to humans, which gives us great hope for life on earth, according to the artists.
What gives Pool of Content its luminescent beauty is the light pouring in through the skylight of Old Customs House, one of several under-utilised buildings in Fremantle that the Biennale has re-energised for November, along with the P&O Hotel (which hosts the end-of-festival spectacular Room Service), Victoria Hall (which celebrated composer Ben Frost has filled with dangling speakers) and Whalefall, a drone-elevated revitalisation of the skeletal remains of the shed across from Port Beach.
These activations and reimagining of Freo spaces are a timely reminder that sanctuary — could a theme be more pertinent during a housing crisis? — begins by appreciating what we already have.
Read the full article here
