22 January 2009
Bicentennial Park is now home to an intriguing art installation that draws the issue of housing in big cities into focus.
The Flats, by Claire Healy and Sean Cordeiro, is based on the contemporary Eastern European housing phenomenon dubbed Splavovi, in which the remains of Soviet industry are fashioned into floating houses that adorn the waterways of cities such as Belgrade.
Forty-four-gallon drums are welded together on angle-ironed frames and topped off with a wooden deck, a small wooden cabin, and perhaps a little garden and some used car tyres wrapped around the Plimsoll line. These quaint housing structures, which use only the available materials at hand, are the stopgap answer to Belgrade’s housing shortage.
Floating on the Bicentennial Park’s Lake Belvedere, the title of the work alludes to the name given to Homebush Bay by a scouting party shortly after the arrival of the First Fleet in 1788. The Flats creates a pun that alludes to our shared colonial history of the Park and the possible future dream of private real estate developers.
Claire and Sean are artists-in-residence at Newington Armory. As well as this current project, they are busy developing their work for the 2009 Venice Biennale, for which they have been selected to represent Australia.
‘We wanted to create an installation that not only recognises Sydney Olympic Park’s innate assets but also reinforced in the public’s mind why the Park is a community treasure,’ said Claire and Sean.
‘In a sense, the artwork is more of an intervention than a sculpture. Unlike a figurative statue or fountain, The Flats is not immediately read as a self-contained “work of art”. This side stepping of categorisation will invoke the viewer to question the sculpture’s place in the Park and therefore what the Park means to them and why,’ said Claire and Sean.
The Flats was commissioned as part of Sydney Olympic Park Authority’s Temporary Public Art Program.
‘This program offers artists the opportunity to make subtle, temporary interventions into public domain areas of the Park,’ said Manager Arts Programming Tony Nesbitt.
‘Art is essential for making this place special. Artworks in the public domain can respond to the surrounding physical environment, as well as the history of the place.
‘The Flats is a marvellous fit with the Lake Belvedere setting, where thousands of visitors enjoy the Park every weekend over summer. The use of industrial refuse to build the house also resonates strongly with the Park’s industrial past – Bicentennial Park was, of course, once a rubbish dump,’ Mr Nesbitt said.
The Flats will be on exhibition daily until the end of May.
The Flats at Bicentennial Park’s Lake Belvedere
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