Antipodeans: Australian Art

Pip Stokes and Gregory Burgess, Sense, 2009.

Installation made from beeswax, raw silk, cocoon silk, and mixed media. First shown at the Shelter exhibition, RMIT Gallery, Melbourne, Australia, in September-October 2009.

Stokes is an artist and Burgess is an architect who collaborated on this artwork as husband and wife, to speak to the theme of kindness. This work is arranged into loose, six-sided abstracted hexagon blocks to suggest a beehive space. The use of raw cocoon silk is used to evoke intimacy, empathy and commune. Sense was installed outdoors, in the artists’ studio in the Melbourne bush. Viewers are encouraged to walk around the space and experience the healing properties of nature.

Stokes writes of this exhibition: 

It is timely that this exhibition puts ‘kindness’ back into the discourse surrounding art and architecture, as it has long been considered unfashionable and relegated, along with other aspects of empathy, nurture and care, to irrelevance…

An architecture of kindness would, in our thinking, offer some of these same qualities – the intimacy, reciprocity and care that enables empathy and relationship to flow between human beings: an architecture mediating between a challenging yet protective built environment to a kinder world beyond its healing walls.

Source: Pip Stokes. Post by ZeeZee.