Ghost Signs - Illuminate the community (visitor’s) experience in the Heide grounds and healing garden.

The idea is to illuminate the visitor’s experiences and ideas by giving visual form to the personal thoughts, memories and imaginings of visitors and stakeholders (artists, funders, board, staff, gardener’s, staff, indigenous community) of Heide Museum of Modern Art.

Making your mark on – leaving a trace of you – at Heide – be part of the Living Museum

Influences

• Group Activity at Heide: Ghost Sign - Visitor’s tagging Heide
• Artist: Shimon Attie Between Dreams and History, Manhattan’s
  Lower East Side (1998).
• Customer focused/Community engagement approach: Customer Experience
  Design, iterative approach to designing a service, product or space. 
• Art as Movement - Art as Action

Three stages:

• Stage 1. Community Engagement: Popup activation engaging the community to
  respond to a series for questions/provocations about their garden’s, ideas and
  experience of Heide.
• Stage 2. Public Artwork: Quotes, stories and memories gathered from the
  engagement imprinted onto Heide like ‘ghost signs’ or tagging.
• Stage 3. Idea Sharing: Information gathered from the community integrated
  into the Master Plan for Heide.

Stage 1.              Community Engagement

Set up a space in Heide 1 and the gardens to ask questions/provocations of visitor’s as they leave or enter. The space would showcase what other people have shared and contributed. This can be through interviews, postist’s, notes, drawings, or digital submissions (social media campaign).

Types of Questions and Provocations:

• Do you have a favorite garden? Where was it, what’s your memory of it and why was it
  important?
• If you could grow a garden at Heide describe what it would have in it and how it would
  make you feel?
• Describe your experience of Heide and share your memories, ideas, and highlights.
• What space and atmosphere supports your healing?
• If you  could write a poem, draw or paint a picture to the Reed’s about their garden
  what would you want to express?
• If you were sitting with the Reed’s in the garden right now what would you like to
  talk about our ask them? Speaks to Heide I as the house of ideas.

Stage 2.              Public Art and Artifact

Select significant excerpts, stories, questions from the community responses and imprint, inscribe Heide grounds with them through:

• Projection 
• Animated lazer projection 
• Neon signs 
• Graffiti 
• Grass lettering 
• Paste ups 
• Produce a printed program documenting the community responses to the questions and provocations -  poetry, art, photographs of the popup
  activation space.

3.              Idea Sharing

Another outcome could be to share this information with Heide and Urban Designers to inform
elements of the development of Heide and the Master Plan.