Western Australian Sites
Leighton Mosaic Artworks
intro / overview / images / location
Blackwell & Associates PTY LTD
Location: Central Plaza for the Leighton Beach Development
Story of the seven sisters pervades throughout Aboriginal Mythology with various interpretations from one side of the country to another. In the Eastern States, the story tends to revolve around seven young women who are pursued across the sky by a persistent hunter and who eventually became the constellation known as Kooralia, otherwise known as Pleiades. In Western Australia, the dreamtime story revolves around seven hills, North East of the Southern Cross.
In our process of designing the Central Plaza for the Leighton Beach Development, we, Blackwell & Associates thought it would be appropriate to have seven separate Aboriginal Artworks located in the gaps between the seven artificially created dunes that provide shelter down the length of the central public open space, Central Plaza.
This represented a particular significant opportunity in Western Australia as there are generally recognised as being seven separate Aboriginal families who claim custodianship in the broader region around Perth. The concept then was to have an individual artwork representative of the dreamtime story from each of these families, one located for each such space near the ‘dunes’.
This daunting task simply would not have been possible without the involvement of Sandra Hill, herself a well known Aboriginal artist and lecturer in Western Australia who undertook the daunting task of first of all going to speak with each of the Elders of each family group, recording their stories, documenting them in such a fashion that was acceptable to the Elders and then helping to find suitable artists to assist in portraying these dreamtime stories.
Sandra herself took on several of the designs in the absence of any family associated representative being able to competently being able to complete the work. Sandra Hill’s past involvement with Jenny Dawson, another well known Western Australian mosaic artist allowed these works to be physically interpreted and then painstakingly conveyed from a two-dimensional art form into the fired tiles located within their respective places within the Plaza.
Aside from the sheer magnitude of the task that we set Sandra, there was an incredible amount of very sensitive information that had to be dealt with at each stage of the development and Sandra handled this with impeccable aplomb.
The Aboriginal Elders were invited to come and participate in the preparation of their artworks at a number of stages and, we believe, this helped engender a stronger feeling of camaraderie between each of the groups.
Client: Landcorp
Art Coordinator: Andra Kins
Lead Artists: Jenny Dawson & Sandra Hill
intro / overview / images / location
April 2008
