BETWEEN MOUNTAINS
7 storey mural - CENTO APARTMENTS - 100 Northbourne Avenue
When I make a painting for a building, my starting point is always – where am I standing? How can I find a way of relating to this place? How can I make the building embody something essential about the place where it stands?
Arriving home and departing from the building is via internal circulation corridors arranged around a nondescript light well in the centre of the building - it afforded no views, no orienting cues, just a blank concrete wall bisected by a glazed walkway.
The apartments, however, have surprisingly good views towards Galambary (Black Mountain) and Nadya Ngambri (Mt Ainslie) – on investigation, I realised that a line drawn from the summit of each peak runs right through the building.
Hence the name of, and the inspiration for, this work of two halves: Between Mountains.
On the right, colours collected on southern slope of Galambary; on the left, colours reflecting the western face of Mt Ainslie. The work positions and orients the building in its context, welcoming residents home to country.
Each side is comprised of a grid of 100 rectangles, each ‘cell’ big enough to frame a human body. There are 100 different colours in the mural. There are many vantage points for seeing the mural on 7 floors of the building, however there’s no vantage point that allows you to see it in its entirety. You need to get to know your neighbours in order to travel to other floors for different views.
The enormous scale of the mural and its rich and complex tapestry of colour has transformed the quality of the public circulation spaces of the apartment building.
Reflecting on the artwork, Michael Tawa wrote:
“The complexion of a person, or of a place, is its distinctive quality, constituted of inner life-warmth and perceived emergent or radiant colour: of splendour. Colour is not superficial; it is a mark or sign of what carries it, or what causes it to emanate or flow out, from an inner constitution, through the veil that conceals it. Colour is a sign of the times, a signal of place, a signature of character.”
PROJECT CREDITS
Client: Alceon Property group
Interior Design: Dept of Design
Mural Concept + Design: Lymesmith
Mural Painting Team: Lymesmith with The Art of Wall (Leia Sidery and Jo Breneger) and Michael Tawa
Builder: Blackett Commercial
Photography: Sonia van de Haar, Dale Wowk
