This year I participated in Lyndal Jones project ‘Preludes and Sonatas for 15 Painters and Prepared House’ on the 30th of April, 2016 at Watford House, Avoca. Please read below and visit the website for ‘The Avoca Project’ which will gives a background to this event:
The Avoca Project is an international art project in regional Victoria, Australia, centred on Watford House. Referred to locally as ‘The Swiss House’, this pre-fabricated gold-rush residence was imported as numbered planks from Scandanavia via Hamburg in 1852. The house is thus an immigrant, its walls revealing stories of wealth and a European glamour now faded by the harshness of the climate and the decreasing services that are the result of globalisation and climate extremes in rural Australia.
Lyndal Jones is an artist who focuses on the politics of context, place and gender through very long-term projects. Here she works with the local community and national and international artists, scholars and climate change experts to develop a series of works of art to address this weathered but resilient immigrant house , the place, the land together with the social and individual humans who inhabit it as a site of climate change and response.
The Avoca Project takes place over 10 years (2006-2016) and includes land works, exhibitions, performances, film showings, concerts and symposia, always with Watford House rather than simply at it.
