(uplifting music)
Narrator: Look around you, Goulburn.
What do you see when you hit the streets today?
Our public art program has been carefully curated
and commissioned since 1982,
by Goulburn Regional Art Gallery.
They are hardworking pieces.
Let's get to know some of them.
Creating a figurative work with a connection
to the Blues Festival
that is suggested through pathos, or emotion,
is Bill Dorman, with his sculpture,
"Ma baby gone and left me".
-: I suppose I'm a maker, a 3D maker.
I love the found object.
Metals I really enjoy.
I love the patina that they develop.
It ties in also with what I'm feeling about,
and a lot of that is to do with, I suppose,
society and politics, climate and refugees,
and all those social issues bend the way I think,
that that issue is an underlying story.
I was never really a big blues person,
but I like the music.
And they said, "Oh, this one's for Chris Wilson."
It wasn't made through knowing Chris.
It was made through my thoughts on what a harmonica
and a harmonica player and musician does.
And what that's made out of is stainless steel bedsides
from the Vietnam War.
Not that anyone in particular is a vet,
but I suppose the blues are tied
with that sort of trauma of people.
But it was also bought at a local fellow here,
who many people know, called Trader Bob,
who operated here.
Stopped 20 years ago,
but every person who had a shed had stuff from Trader Bob.
And me, in particular.
So, there's a closeness with where I got the material,
which I love, and there's a closeness
with the history of the material.
And he's been sitting there comfortably now for 15 years.
But the nice thing is when you drive by,
just on the way down to the shops,
and someone's sitting there with an arm around it
and someone else is photographing it.
There's so many amazingly creative people.
I mean, in every town, when you dig deep,
I'm not in every town, I'm in Goulburn,
and there are so many amazing artists here.
Probably 35 hours from Sydney to Goulburn,
but it's only two hours from Goulburn to Sydney. (laughs)
Narrator: The theme of music is expressed visually
and conceptually in the work of Kirstie Chalker.
-: It was such an honor to be given the opportunity
to make a public artwork,
with my ex-husband, Dale, him being the musician,
me being the artist.
It was really the first time I collaborated
with another person to make an artwork.
-: In 2004, my wife, Kirstie, was given the commission
to do this artwork
for the Blues Hall of Fame,
for the Blues Music Festival here in Goulburn.
-: The beauty of Goulburn's art scene is there's a lot
of very practical people, which I found different.
Most of us are farmers.
I've been in Goulburn, living and working on farms,
for the last 24 years,
so it's more of a down to earth community here.
-: I was really only her partner in crime,
as she instigated most of it.
-: Been a big fan of music myself,
and been going to blues festivals for over 20 years.
It's such an honor to have met Dom Turner,
who the sculpture was dedicated to, and Rob Hurst.
-: As it turned out,
Dom famously can't actually read music,
so he wasn't as impressed by the premise
of the work as he was by the aesthetic appearance of it,
but he was still impressed with it, which was nice.
Narrator: Continuing in the vein of the figurative
is a very special work,
located at the front of Belmore Park.
With it's heritage style surroundings
that speak to classical architecture,
and a history of Victorian beauty in public spaces,
the park is the perfect place
to question style, history and meaning.
Luke Chiswell is an artist who works across sculpture,
drawing, painting, design and fashion,
often creating works
that shift back and forth between these worlds.
Based between Collector and New York City,
he's a local with wings.
As a work in bronze,
"Hold Your Head Up" carries with it material associations
of power, authority and posterity,
all deeply affiliated with imperial European statuary.
The beauty of this work is its deviation
from that hefty, historical meaning.
Chiswell's work is not traditional
or anatomically realistic, like conventional statuary.
While bronze is a medium well-versed
in promoting messages from emperors to civilians,
Chiswell's sculpture takes a public issue
as its point of inspiration.
It is an ode to staying positive and confident,
with a healthy dose of imagination.
It is a reminder to the people of a regional community
to stay sane in a world that doesn't make
that simple goal easy.
Over the road, and down Russell Lane,
we are engulfed by an art form
that the human race has been deeply engaged with
for over 30,000 years.
Murals.
"Conflux", an artwork by Brad Eastman, or Beastman,
is an example of a contemporary mural,
it's history entwined with graffiti and street art,
with bright electric colors and a blend of soft
and rigid forms that reflect the human-made
and natural elements of Goulburn as a physical space.
let's meet Beastman.
-: Well, for me, in my work,
it's important to illustrate that relationship
between the organic and natural landscape
where Goulburn exists, and how we, as humans,
choose to develop that landscape, alter that landscape
and obviously build structures on the landscape.
I like to portray this futuristic sense of
what will nature be and what is the future of nature,
and trying to, through different patterns
and different structures, colors, and the composition.
It's almost like these paintings are man versus nature,
so you have these organic patterns
and elements that represent natural landscape,
and then you have hard, geometric patterns
and colors that represent human influence.
So, whenever a murals in a passageway like that,
I definitely go for a really bright color palette
and really hard-edged geometric stuff,
so you can't help but notice it.
You can't help but engage with it as you move
through the space.
So I obviously consider the actual environment that I'm in
and what's in this landscape,
like where is Goulburn and what is it surrounded by?
Probably the most prominent feature of the mural
is these big, flowing,
almost wobbly organic lines
that pass through the composition.
They represent a number of different things.
They can represent either a pathway,
like a human pathway through landscape,
or it can represent a natural pathway through landscape,
which would be like a river.
(uplifting music)
Narrator: Located on the gallery's south-east facade,
the final work on our walk is a collaborative piece
by Dr Emrah Baki Ulas,
and local artist Jenny Bell.
With the guts of its stylistic components
directly referencing Goulburn's renowned wool industry,
"Luminous Merinos" brings an entire practice to life
through a contemporary medium.
Light.
-: I collaborated on this work with the artist,
with Jenny Bell, and she created
24 individual charcoal drawings
of merinos.
She has a farm as well,
so she has a very intimate understanding of these animals
and really, she lives around them.
-: They do have a way of being in the world
that's unique to that particular sheep,
and I've spent many years in sheep yards,
and I've observed that.
And each sheep looks different.
A mob of sheep looks the same until you really look,
and as an artist, you're trained to really look.
So I just went to the sheep yards and spent a few days,
until I got some sheep
that I thought might work in that project.
Fairly stark, simple outlines
of their most evocative features, I suppose.
Emrah took it from there,
and made the work pretty true to the drawings.
And it was astonishing
to see them lit up in lights in Goulburn.
Drawing's always been an end in itself for me.
I don't draw to make a painting.
I draw to make something alive for me.
I think Emrah's skills, I mean, he knew nothing about sheep,
and a lot about lighting,
and so, he was able to
really, pretty faithfully reproduce those drawings,
enlarge them, light them up, put them into a position
that worked for the site, and I couldn't have done that.
-: Light is such an amazing medium.
It is something
that we haven't really defined accurately yet.
Its definition has changed over centuries,
over different eras,
so really, working with light is working with something
that we don't really know.
It's intangible, but it makes things come to life.
It awakens feelings and emotions.
Translating those dark, black lines into a work
that is made of light,
that basically
reveals itself outside transparency,
at nighttime, was both a very challenging
and a very interesting process.
It was really important to understand
where she was coming from
and the nuances she was communicating with those works,
and how those will translate in my own hands,
with my etching onto acrylic,
which is a completely different medium,
and something that will come to life using LED lighting.
As a regional art gallery, when you look at,
you hardly ever see a regional art gallery
with a facade light art piece that is on at nighttime,
so it really anchors the location of the gallery.
It puts the landmark within the cityscape,
and it makes it visible,
and reminds people that art is there at nighttime,
as well as during daytime.
(uplifting music)