The Stony Rises Project

Jenny Lowe

Jenny Lowe trained as an architect and has used various forms of art practice, including performance (with arts council funding in the United Kingdom), painting and installation, as research and inter-disciplinary collaboration for her architectural design. Jenny has combined teaching, research and practice to promote an understanding of the earth and its unfolding dynamics as the “site” of a recent human inhabitation that might work with respectful, creative co-existence. More recently her practice has critically focused on earth–human relationships within the current dynamics of global warming. She has received public funding in the United Kingdom for this research and exhibited in the UK and Australia. Jenny recently returned from a long period of educating and practising in the UK, where she was an academic program leader in the Faculty of Arts and Architecture at the University of Brighton. She is currently researching and teaching design at RMIT. 

Interview

Why did you choose to be involved in The Stony Rises Project?

When I was presented with the opportunity to become involved in The Stony Rises Project I had recently returned to live in Melbourne after many years of living and working in the UK. Through my childhood and adolescent years my experience of the Stony Rises area had left a profound mark on my subsequent creative and academic life.

What is your connection to the Western District area of Victoria?

I spent many of my school holidays staying with my grandparents in Colac. My grandfather was one of a family of butchers in Murray street and often took me on his journeys to deliver meat to the outlying areas. These journeys impressed upon me, from an early age, the long-time of the earth and its dynamics. This was probably an important antidote to backyard life in the south eastern suburbs of Melbourne in the 1950s and 1960s. The stories my grandparents told me about their pioneering youth also impressed upon me the changes that had taken place in one person’s lifespan.

Did you have any preconceived ideas or plans for your work before embarking on the artists’ camp?

I was carrying the baggage that I have just outlined but was trying not to have preconceived ideas for the work that might come out of the project. That said I was also interested in confronting the ways that memory edits, distorts and even romanticizes the past. I have practiced as an artist, a designer, an architect and an academic. I have also collaborated with other artists with artwork as an outcome of that collaboration. I was however keen, with the Stony Rises Project, that my contribution might be an architectural response.

How would you describe your artistic practice from concept to making?

I start with making, that is working with materials in the actual world, to discover the concept/s to drive the work. In my architectural practices ‘site’ is important and I first need to investigate the past and present unfolding geological time and historical time of the site in order to discover potentialities that might inform its future. In The Stony Rises Project the ‘Timeline’ drawings are where this happens. With these drawings I was trying to understand the time of the new volcanoes and the time of human inhabitation of this surface of the earth and the transformative impact of each. I was initially simulating the lava tongue flows of the Stony Rises with ink and pigments, whilst studying the geological survey maps and geological and historical writings. The project, to locate any new homes needed for the area in the disused quarries – working with intensive water harnessing, grew out of the ‘Timeline’ drawings. I find the quarries to be magnificent in the way that they reveal the volcanic events that created, over time and sequential eruptions, the land surface and volcanic cones/craters of the area.

What is it about the Western Districts that inspired you?

The sky and the way clouds appear from another world beyond the western horizon and disappear into another world to the east, the way that their shadows move across the lava plains, the way that they are collecting dust/cloud seeds from the dried up lakes and dropping a little rain with a rainbow to celebrate (I have recently learnt that the particular atmospheric conditions of the lava plains is produced by the funneling of prevailing winds between the Great Divide and the Otways – always a bigger world beyond!). But the volcanoes also invite me to imagine what it was like here when they were releasing the pent-up energies of the inner earth, transforming this land surface so dramatically. The speed with which this landscape is being transformed now by dried up and drying up lakes because of diminishing rainfalls is particularly stunning.

What did you hope to capture in your work?

I hoped to capture the long-time of the earth and the relatively short-time of human inhabitation. I was also trying to focus an awareness of the dramatic atmospheric changes now taking place through global warming and to make a constructive response.

Is this your usual practice or did the project bring about a new direction?

My interest in the effects of the warming of the earth has been growing for some time this project allowed me to understand better its effects in the region of Victoria.

The Stony Rises Project

A NETS Victoria Touring Exhibition developed by the RMIT Design Research Institute. Curators: Lisa Byrne, Professor Harriet Edquist and Associate Professor Laurene Vaughan

Presented by: