‘Vessel’

Moments of Place Exhibition - Papermountain Gallery, Perth

Co-exhibitors: Shannon Lyon (artist) wall works + Robyn Creagh (urbanist) floor work

Catalogue Essay by Prof. Leon van Schaik AO

Architectural Project Team: Simon Pendal and Callum Spurge

‘VESSEL’ is an elliptical columnar room of sixteen ‘three-leaf clover’ columns has been conceived as a work of architecture, a spatial project which re-casts the existing gallery in a new light. In designing this site-specific work, the original gallery’s distinctive spatial grammar was identified, accepted and quietly embellished.  This observation of the room  –  its proportions, evenly placed highlight windows, quiet and indirect south light, its meter, colouration, modest detail and extreme interiority  – led me to think specifically of other spatial situations with which it may be associated from the canon of architecture as well as those from within my own spatial history.  As such, resonances between the original gallery space and appropriately affiliated spatial situations – Borromini’s San Carlino (1646), Neumann’s Basilica of the Fourteen Holy Helpers (1772), and Alvaro Siza’s Santa Maria de Canaveses (1996) were established.  The introduction of this temporary, primitive and fragile ‘columnar room’ is intended to resonate with the gallery’s existing grammar, bringing it into an intensified and adjusted state of expression.  By acting this way, this newly completed room attempts to become ‘central enough’ in our collective and individual spatial histories that, through one’s imagination, it induces affiliations of other times and places within the visitor.