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.

The idea is to create more (1 or more) Heide Museums - but a small, transparent and intimate space only experienced by one person – that contains different experiences inside and positioned within different/changing locations.

Concept/idea is to speak to or critique the:

• Rent-a-heide - Commodification of land, space, art, view and experience (exclusivity)
• Heide as artist retreat, idea generator, explorer and growth
• Green house or incubator (hospital) used for healing, respite and growing - Hibernation or controlled environment away
  from society to provide accelerated healing or growth
• Disconnected and connected to the garden – stay out of the elements to heal
• Healing elements of intimacy and quiet in a large landscape
• Living Museum – mini museums recreating historical settings to simulate past time period, providing visitors with an experiential interpretation of history.
• Growing number of gallery/museum’s at Heide
• Artefacts housed in glass cabinets in museums – human as artefact (preserved)
• Experienced ‘plonked’ or ‘drag and drop’ locations of sculptures

Public Art: A mini house-shaped space for one person to sit within and experience either or both and internal (inside) environment and the external (outside).

Inside:                       Observing the environment and others in the environment

Outside:                   Observing individuals inside the house

Examples:

• The Studio: inside prompted to explore ideas, like a creative incubator – questions proposed on cards, paper and pencils provided.
• Healing Pod | Inside | a silent space or recorded sounds of other Heide locations (water flowing at Yarra end, birds in trees), warm, comfortable and meditative space.
• The Heide Hotel (sleeping pod) | Inside | Comfortable silent space to rest your eyes
• The Reading Room (reading pod) | Inside | Heide literature provided books, artists books, letter’s to and from the Reed’s, sound recordings of letter’s or stories about the place (Reed’s and
  indigenous.
• The Gallery/Museum | Inside | sit and hear recorded voices of visitor’s chatting at the opening of an exhibition or the artist describing a visual artwork in the museum.

The Reed’s molded Heide into a personal Eden, cconnecting art with nature and creating a nourishing environment for the artists they championed.

A Sanctuary:

• a sacred place
• a haven
• a place of refuge and rest for humans,
  animals and plants
• a place where you can feel at peace
• declared a sanctuary eg; refuge, safe place, protected

Speaks to the Reed’s intent to:

• cultivate a safe place for contemplation
• cultivate a garden
• cultivate relationships
• cultivate an art culture

The Structure: White Fence / Birds Cage – Taming a
wild garden

Signifies: Preserve, maintain
and protect what’s within and keep out what’s outside 

                  Tension between 

English garden —- Indigenous garden
Tame                                           Free
Curated                                       Wild
Built form                                   Nature
Stagnant                                    Growing
History                                        Living
Past                                              Future
Museum                                    Garden

Scar Tree                   ——      Oak Tree
Indigenous Native  ——     Planted
River Redgum                 ——     Algerian Oak
Indigenous Culture    ——    Colonisation

Context:

• Both trees are significant and in significant locations at the entrance.
• Little information about the indigenous history of the land and local culture.
• Opportunity to work with the community and explore this and share knowledge.
• Indigenous Remnant Conservation Zone (connect with them)

Concept

Tree as artifact as monument in the living museum 

Scar Tree / Yingabeal 

• 600-700 years old marker tree.
• Convergence point of travel route known as song
  lines – directional and instructional songs to guide you on your journey and
  inform you of the land and cultures.
• Most significant scar tree – a convergence of 5 songlines, the most important marker tree in Melbourne