Art Installations

At the thresholds to Prahran Square, The Pipes is an invitation to experience an expansive clearing.

Composing light, movement and environmental sounds into an atmosphere of call and response, the work creates a new space of belonging.

A site-specific visual and audio installation co-designed by Ramus and Material Thinking, in collaboration with Lyons Architects.

Bruce Ramus is a light artist. Ramus presents his works as compelling platforms for both personal and civic expansion, designed to reflect our environment, encourage social engagement and articulate our civic voice.

Ramus recognises the nature of urban design is shifting into non-imposing, integrated spaces that include light as a means of communication, as a way of dematerialising form, of balancing scale and intimacy.

Bruce Ramus founded Ramus Studios to contribute and support this artistic vision.

Material Thinking (Co-Directors, Paul Carter, Edmund Carter) is a public space design studio. Working between architecture, urban design and public art, it specialises in cross-cultural creative collaboration and enjoys a close relationship with the Aboriginal-owned cultural consultancy, Nyungar Birdiyia.

Recent public art highlights include Passenger (Yagan Square, Perth) and Borders, Signatures and Unfolding Rose (all Springvale cultural precinct, City of Greater Dandenong). 

To create the soundscapes for The Pipes, Material Thinking teamed up with independent sound artist Christopher Williams and composer Catherine Wood. Find details about the sound sources can be found on the Absolute Rhythm website.

For more information visit ramus.com.au.

Ringform 1&2 are ‘living’ sculptures, which represent the artist’s deep interest in the intersection of the natural world and the man-made.

The architectural rings have firstly been embedded with materials that the artist has sourced from industrial sites, and then soened by the cultivation and integration of Australian native plants, which continue to grow and evolve over time.

The work of Jamie North operates at the intersection of the natural and the human-made. In his cast concrete sculptures, native Australian plant species are employed to seek out natural growth lines and explore the landscape of the work. In time, the selected plants become entangled with the inorganic concrete, creating a continuously evolving and living sculptural form.

There is a fascinating merger of dichotomies at play within North’s sculptures; between the unpredictability of their lush inner crevices and their obdurate exterior shells. The work simultaneously invokes ideas of progress and collapse, industry and ruin, melancholy and triumph.

The use of industrial materials further blurs the disjunction between the naturally occurring and the anthropogenic. The jagged edges of North’s poetically eroded forms expose a variety of aggregates such as coal ash and steel slag, which despite having the appearance of volcanic rock, are by-products of industry.

This redemptive re-use of the waste generated by human activity sits alongside that most definitive of regenerative processes: the succession of nature.

For more information visit jamienorth.com.

murnalong celebrates bees for their significance in our global ecosystem.

Its title ‘murnalong’ is a local Indigenous Boon Wurrung word meaning ‘bee’.

Throughout her practice the artist highlights commonalities across cultures. Historically an important food source for Indigenous Australians, bees remain crucially important to our shared future.

Dr. Fiona Foley is a founding member of Boomalli Aboriginal Artist Co-operative. She exhibits regularly in Australia and internationally.

Foley completed her PhD with Griffith University in 2017. The thesis examined Queensland's legislation, 'The Aboriginals Protection and Restriction of the Sale of Opium Act', 1897.

Her work on this subject was received with significant interest and was the subject of a proposal for a national tour under the auspices of Museums and Galleries Queensland.

In 2017 Foley was appointed Adjunct Professor to Gnibi College of Indigenous Australian Peoples at Southern Cross University. In 2014 she was the recipient of an Australia Council Visual Arts Award.

She is a regular keynote speaker at conferences and symposia all over the world.

In 2014 she convened Courting Blakness: Recalibrating Knowledge in the Sandstone University at the University of Queensland, where she was an Adjunct Professor (2011-2017).

For more information visit fionafoley.com.au.