Eyelands

Shortlisted proposal for the National Arboretum Canberra’s Front Dam Public Art Commission

An Arboretum is a human construct, an artificial collection of trees of specific species. Eyelands plays with this idea, anthropomorphising and cultivating the landscape even further by rendering the dam surface as a type of abstracted comic face with eyes. The eyes are kinetic - moving at the command of the wind. They follow you as you look down at them, and they change gently as you move. They suggest something alive living on or underneath the surface – perhaps for children it activates stories of Bunyips. Perhaps the dam could become an Arboretum character that people will identify with, a type of mascot.

This constant shifting and reanimating echoes the slow and ever changing beauty of the Arboretum experience. This is true both in the way the landscape is changing over longer periods, across years and decades, but also echoing and reframing the various vantage points of someone visiting for a day. So staring from the Tonkin Zulaikha Greer Visitors Centre, riding high on top of Dairy Farmers Hill, looking down from Wide Brown Land, flying kites around the Margaret Whitlam Pavilion or entering from Tuggerong Parkway. Each of these vantage points shape the view of the dam but affect the place from which you see it. They reflect each other.

Like the dam, which is a hole in the ground, so like an eyeball. And eyeball shapes abound. Once you see them, like the eyes on the face of the water, they appear everywhere. The tree ring circle on the floor of the NAC Village Centre, the Griffin’s plan for Canberra filled with circles, Roy Grounds Australian Academy of Science and James Turrell’s Skyspace ‘Within without’ at the NGA.