Jacob squire
BOtanica 2021 project proposal
Botanica 2021 festival is a temporary contemporary art festival located in the City Botanic Gardens.The festival aims to offer site-specific artworks representing deep connections to the place and providing meaningful cultural interactions and experiences.
My team responded to a brief that called for an expanded approach to public art and site activation with emphasises on temporal, environmental, process-based, performance and interactive works.
The project proposal we devised in response to the brief is a work titled Out Of Transit (2021). Out Of Transit is a sculptural installation situated within the Brisbane city botanic gardens on Residence Hill. The work utilises a Brisbane city bus stop, with an incorporated soundscape aspect. The bus stop juxtaposes the garden space, referencing the surrounding cityscape, stripping the bus stop of its perceived purpose. When viewed at night the bus stop is illuminated by a soft white glow from the empty advertisement spaces. The time table will be replaced with imagery of root systems of the gardens emphasizing the connective natural systems within the gardens contrasting the frantic nature of bus routes. The soundscape residing within the bus stop will consist of street recordings from the surrounding city and will periodically pose the viewer with two questions: Where have you been? Where are you going?
My place as a practitioner of the visual arts within the development of this proposal was as a designer and fabricator. Being one of the two designers and fabricators within this group of four, the creative visualisations where delegated between two people. This allowed for a fantastic opportunity to hone my design, photoshop and construction skills.
Visualisations
during the development of this project, I was tasked with the creation of many concept visualisations. The first of these visualisations was a photoshop mock-up of the artwork on site. to create this image, I gathered photos of both the site, residence hill, and of bus stops with in the Brisbane CB in order to capture the desired effect
further conceptualisation for Out of Transit involved the development of maps of roots for surrounding trees within the gardens. These map designs, although not entirely accurate to the actual gardens, complete their purpose within this proposal stage.
These root maps act as a replacement of a Brisbane bus stops timetable and bus route
Furthering the visualisations of this artistic installation I drew up a deconstructed bus stop through adobe illustrator. On completion of this visualisation it was laser cut, painted and constructed.
This physical mock up of the Out of Transit artwork acted as a method of furthering our understanding of the requirements needed for the physical construction of the artwork
Without these visual communications, the Out of Transit project proposal would have failed in both physical construction and conceptual communication. To be able to assist in this portion of the projects development acted as both a fantastic use of my current creative skillset, and a chance to further advance these skills and add to my professional portfolio