Wake

I am sitting in the front row of the mixed use space of the newly opened National Centre of Environmental Art in Halls Gap. I am soon to be introduced to give a talk about my involvement in the project – the last of the three speakers for the day. The museum opened to the public for the first time at 11.00am this morning.

For weeks now I have been ambiently trying to decide what it is that I will say. Like any project of this scale I could talk and gossip and theorise about it for hours, but I have a half hour time slot – so I have to pick an angle. Ideally something digestible in that short time while at the same time something that avoids the pitfalls of generalisation that usually affords brevity. At 1.00am on this same morning I realised what that angle will be. I was up late writing it up. And now I’m banking on the hope that I don’t look as tired as I should.

Pippa Mott, the project’s CEO, rises to introduce me - which she does with a sparkling brevity. The audience of WAMA Foundation board members, nationally recognised artists, gallerists from Melbourne and Sydney, wildlife enthusiasts, journalists from around the state, eager members of the Halls Gap, Stawell, Pomonal, and Arrarat local community and other members of the visiting public await.

Here we go.

Hello. Thank you Pippa for inviting me to share some thoughts here today,

Twelve years ago, when charged with developing a tourism and development master plan for Halls Gap, I naively imagined, described, and promoted an impossibly aspirational vision for the place — one that had no way of being funded, and required the citizens of, and visitors to, the area to organise and act with a dedication of energy and capacity of skill that, to my outsider's eye, seemed not to exist.

Presenting this tourism and development master plan at a community event, my vision was met with disbelief.

The dusty-shop culture and dead main-street vibe of the Halls Gap of a decade ago seemed totally unable to embrace the value and potential that the majestic and beautiful Gariwerd environment represented — a vision of a place of both significant cultural history and compelling contemporary visitor experience.

At this same event, I was buttonholed by Glenda and Greg Lewin. 

And through a collaboration with them, and many hundreds of others also motivated by their energy for a seemingly impossible dream, we find ourselves at the opening of this project today.

And isn’t it wonderful to be here?!

I invite you to notice how the low eave over the deck outside this room compresses our view into the trees beyond, creating an intimacy with them.

The arrival sequence of this building, which you have just passed through to get to your seats, exercises a similar technique of compression and release: walking through the entry along the axis of what will soon be a boardwalk taking visitors down to a wetland at the centre of this beautiful triangle of land, you pass beneath the lowest point of the museum’s ceiling.

Being almost able to touch it creates another experience of compression, which then explodes in a moment of experiential grandeur as the roof rises up over the deck and your line of sight is suddenly called to the sky above and beyond — a transformation.

The curved screen at the approach wraps the building’s length around you, making it seem too small to contain the generous 400 m² gallery space within.

The mixed-use space (that we are now in), the café, the toilets, the shop, and the entry all sit beneath a low-hung winged roof arranged over the aforementioned entry axis. 

This roof has an almost shed-like, agrarian quality. It has been designed to have an approachable, touchable,  human scale.

This human-scale quality is important, as it offsets the grand significance of the gallery – whose capabilities cannot be overstated.

The gallery and back-of-house spaces of this museum have climate control, archival, and security specifications that enable it to borrow and exhibit works from the world’s most significant cultural institutions.

This museum has the capacity to borrow works from the likes of the Smithsonian, the Louvre, or the Guggenheim.

And it is clear from the museum’s powerful inaugural exhibition that this potential is not lost on the project’s CEO.

The ability this borrowing power has to transform this region has now begun — and it won’t take long before it is fully realised and prosecuted.

I am proud to say that I designed this building.

According to the contract between my company and the WAMA Foundation, I own the intellectual property of its architecture and have licensed it to them for the purpose of making this building.

This ownership underpins the sentiment that any architect expresses when they say the words “you must come and see my latest building.”

But let us reflect for a moment on the absurdity of that sentiment.

This building no more belongs to me than it does to the architects at TAUT who collaborated on the design – nor the landscape architects at TRACTand Ochre who contributed to the site’s masterplan and the design of the Endemic garden.

Or the structural engineers at OPS whose calculations keep the structure from blowing away or falling on our heads.

Or to BGSM and TRACT who worked through the amazingly complicated and tedious hoops to ensure the building met the constraints of the National Construction Code and local, state, and federal planning codes.

Or to the services and environmental engineers at Lucid, who ensured the building could meet the client’s brief of a world-standard gallery climate control for the display and storage of art while still meeting the stringent sustainable design provisions required of all public buildings in Australia.

Or to the cost planners at WT Partnership who helped us imagine the building as a table of numbers long before it was sketched or drawn.

Or to the faithful project managers at Case Meallin who kept the design and construction teams focused on the brutal realities of time and money at the expense of all else.

Nor does it belong to me any more than it does to the members of the Design Control Team established by the WAMA Foundation to conceive of the brief for the building, interrogate, and then approve the design as it evolved.

Or to the builders who toiled to actually make it, and all the many people who made the building components and materials and shipped them here.

Nor to the thousands of WAMA Foundation volunteers who have poured their hearts, souls, and sweat into this project and its surroundings for over a decade now.

Nor to the WAMA Foundation Board whose ongoing wisdom and stewardship this project depends on.

It no more belongs to me than it does to the founders of the WAMA Foundation, Glenda and Greg Lewin, whose dream for this museum became a vision, then became a serious and long-term, life-changing commitment backed by unfailing determination in the face of many odds that have inspired so many of you who are here today.

Or to the project’s eminent whirlwind CEO Pippa Mott and her team, who have enthusiastically embraced the responsibility of making this place work and who see possibilities that will bring it critical acclaim and expand it beyond what it was first imagined to be.

It no more belongs to me any more than it does to you, members of the public, whose hard work produces the taxes that directly fund this project, and whose same taxes enable the deductions offered to those who have made donations to the WAMA Foundation.

And, as is the condition of tax-deductible donations, nor does it belong to these same donors whose generosity extends well beyond the deductions they will receive.

The Traditional Owners of this land, who were violently deposed of it by the settlers of the British Empire, will tell you that land cannot be owned any more than you can own yourself. The concept of Country, and the concept of people, are one and the same. The stories of people and Country pass through us, and outlive us.

The architecture of this building, and the project that it helps house, belongs to none of us — we are but its caretakers in a blip of time.

Having been charged as the caretaker of this project’s architecture begs the question: what position did I take, and values did I invest in the design decisions that I made and argued for?

To answer that, consider this speculation: perhaps the origins of architecture lie in the cave — a type of space that we crawled into to protect ourselves from the elements, and on whose walls we made paintings of the hunting and dancing we did at that time.

Or perhaps the origins of architecture lie in the tent, into whose fabric we wove patterns of the stories of who we were at that point in time.

Either way, the making of architecture forces an attempt to embed in built-form an expression of a specific moment of the human condition.

And in this moment, this precious blip of time in which we humans exist, is a moment where the stories of our relationship with the natural environment are at a crescendo. The concept of nature — a concept that we invented — is deeply and culturally connected to our collective and individual selves.

If you doubt the connectedness of humans to nature, simply pull on a tuft of your own hair or pinch a sensitive fold of your skin until it hurts. That slight pain you feel — that is nature at work

As are the other feelings that we have found complex and clever words for: love, hate, fear, pride, happiness, grief, ambition, aspiration, generosity, envy, stoicism, altruism.

These are all nature. You cannot choose to feel any of these things. They choose you, because they are in your nature.

That humans have for so long considered themselves separate from nature is proving to be our ultimate hubris. And this is loud within the consciousness of now.

Humans are a subset of nature. We are dependent on it, more than it is dependent on us. Humans have irreparably changed nature from the form we understood it to have when we first started recording it in stories, on tablets, in books, and in digital databases.

And in the seven decades since we first became aware of how our changing it was curtailing our ability to depend upon it, we have dramatically accelerated our impact on it — and continue to do so with no sign of slowing down.

But no matter the size of our impact on nature, no matter how extensive the irreparable damage we reap, nature will survive. It will outlive us. Easily.

We humans are but a blip on the timescale of nature that we are able to conceive — let alone the timescale that we are not. And as we witness the changes we have wrought upon the narrow definition of the natural environment that pertains to our existence, we have become increasingly aware of our own mortality as a species.

We are at the funeral of the world as we know it. How shall we survive the awful grief of this funeral? We shall survive it the way we survive any funeral—by processing this grief.

And this starts with the wake. The wake is where the life that has just been put to rest is celebrated. The wake is where we cry with joy over the silly things our aunt once did, or laugh about the time our uncle decided to take up knitting and insisted everyone wear his comically ill-fitting garments at a family event.

At a wake we celebrate a life just put to rest even though we well know the celebrations won’t bring it back. And this celebration is where tangible hope is rekindled.

This contradiction in this collision of death and hope is life. At the core of this contradiction lies the reason people make art. The making of art comes from our indefatigable urge to understand our own existence in spite of the incredible limits of the very knowledge that we are so certain of.

As the powerful exhibition in the gallery behind you so clearly demonstrates, the National Centre of Environmental Art opens at a moment in time when the certainty of our knowledge of the natural environment,and how we depend on it is at its most useless. And that is why this museum must exist. 

The architecture and curatorial content of this museum celebrate the natural environment at the very moment when our growing grief demands that celebration.

And the curatorial project of this museum will play a critically important role in winning over the hearts and minds that will generate the political will required to write and prosecute meaningful climate policy — a political will that does not yet exist, in spite of the Federal Labor Party’s almost unprecedented recently-won electoral mandate.

Central to this project’s ability to change hearts and minds is the restorative act of donating this piece of land to Trust for Nature.

The efficacy of this has already been proven by the decades of work that the WAMA Foundation volunteers have poured into the endemic garden and its surrounds.

The architecture of this building that protects us, and our art, from the elements of the very environment we are here to celebrate is one part of this project whose legacy will outlive its founders and all of us who have worked on it to date. And like every one of the contributions made by each member of this extensive community of interests, it is a very important one.

The making of art is often a very solitary act, but the exhibiting, publishing, and curating of that art in a museum is the necessarily-public opposite of that act.

The acts of architecture and curating are forced to prosecute the private making of art through the ugly processes of management, contracts, politics, and personal aesthetics.

Like the curating and exhibiting of art, the act of architecture must engage with the ambitions, visions, and dreams — and fears, petty whims, and shortcomings — of the human condition. The condition of the human public.

This public museum is your National Centre of Environmental Art.

And as the architect of the building that houses it, I feel very proud to be one of the many people who have come here this weekend to bring to a close its relatively private period of conception, invention, ideation, and creation — and to be one of the many people who will today declare it open!