Carpette – Mounge
Carpette Landscape series No 16: Pocket Parks MOUNGES.
This work was commissioned by Artisan, Brisbane and sponsored by Urban Arts Projects UAP.
LANDSCAPE series No. 16, ‘Pocket Parks’ (Mounges) written by Louise Martin Chew
Landscape Series No. 16, ‘Pocket Parks’ are affectionately known as Mounges. They create a green oasis within unpredictable sites. Each Mounge is integrated into the fabric of its landscape and is intended to change perceptions of the existing site. This series looks at the human construction of ‘landscape’ and ‘terrain’ and comes under the banner of social sculptures – whereby engagement activates meaning. They are neither architecture, furniture nor landscape but locations a body may occupy. Taking the form of a small mountain range of grassy lounges, they sprout out of the city/urban landscape at once incongruous yet with familiar elements.
Mounges encourage respite zones with which passersby can engage. They may have lunch, chat, picnic, meet or simply watch the ebb and flow of city life, leading to a variety of different sensory experiences that may activate a range of personal meanings or memories.
Mounges are temporary sculptures specifically designed for the public domain. They transform an urban space or concrete thoroughfare into a recreational landscape: a ‘pocket park’ evoking an aspirational green ideal for the city, with flow-on benefits for pedestrians, traders and city users.
Past works by Nicole Voevodin-Cash are indicative of the social and psychological implications vested in this type of urban terrain. Despite their artificial genesis, Mounges harmonise with natural elements in their surroundings, playing with the viewer’s perception of nature. Dr Sally Butler has encapsulated the environmental implications of Voevodin-Cash’s temporary works, describing her projects as taking:
…[their] point of departure from a concept of the artwork as an event rather than an object. The artist and audience collaborate in engaging the spaces of city life, prompted by a temporary intervention into their hubs of pedestrian traffic. These organic ‘events’ migrate to hotspots of cultural milieu and temporarily transform the spatial basis of social interaction. These temporary public artworks have a special quality of novelty, notation and surprise that play an important role in a community’s vision of themselves in urban frameworks – how they habitually live their lives, and how they want to live otherwise.
The unique qualities of immediacy and spontaneity also give these temporary public artworks an inherently experimental quality, resonating with human desire for change and stimulating creative thinking. Their transient, re-locatable nature and subtle integration into the fabric of the environment allows the artwork to become something of a social experiment that tests our human sensibilities against the grain of built and natural environments. Their location in different venues bears the imprint of city life and tells its own story about its people and place.”1.
1.”The LANDscapers Project: Experiments in Re-locatable Temporary Public Art” by Dr Sally Butler, University of Queensland, School of English, Media Studies & Art History, 1 May 2009.
Photo: Andrea Higgins