Most days the carpet on Level 11 of the Town Hall House is a murky ball- point blue. But, last Friday the carpet of one of the rooms was set on paintings by imagistic predictions of school children, participants in our ‘Sustainable Sydney’ project. Each student had created an A3 art work which will accompany the poem on the AMP building projection, in October. Myself and some of the project crew tip toed, crawled and bent about each illustration hand picking the art work for projection.
I would like to think my ideas in the painting selection were helpful yet, the council and projectionist has the final say. Now the poems are written Red Room can twist in a new direction, turn our backs on the poems and let you offer variations on their stories.
For this project, Red Room is now concentrating on recording the participating poets and asking them to predict the future of poetry in 2030.
The art work reflected many themes the poems contain, like hovering, flight, dogs, sun and orbiting dragons fighting and cuddling whilst keeping an eye on the earth below. However the poems condense the kid’s concerns and wishes in 5 lines, he paintings expand their ideas into thick, primary colours. These paintings are now being animated and will eventually flick in and across the 5 lined poems each poet wrote
Look for:
..digital carnival of objects (bridges, trees, houses) and idiosyncratic beings hip hopping with fire hot energy and cartoon inspired spite….
My preferred painting was an illustration without people or smiles. The student had sketched an aerial map of Hyde Park resembling some of John Wolseley‘s art which navigates Australian landscapes in stipples, scratches and linear song.
When reading the poem alongside this map design, the future was a humble geographical prediction of Sydney in 2030, the park as the beginning and end of communities and life and the walker was guided by reading lines, breath and the gaps between them.
