We made this video doco in the lead up to Sunset Symphony in the Sunflowers in July 2017. It was screened as the finale as the sun went down. The documentary shows the work of Simon Mattsson in developing regenerative agriculture methods for sugarcane, and tells the story of how artists and farmers came together […]
This was a short news piece that aired on Channel 7 Mackay, in the lead up to Sunset Symphony in the Sunflowers. We were in the thick of carving out the amphitheatre from the sunflowers and sugarcane field at this point – you can see from the drone footage that it’s not yet complete. The […]
In the lead up to Sunset Symphony in the Sunflowers, Tegan Philpott from ABC Radio Tropical North dropped in to the Mattsson family farm to talk about soil health, sunflowers, composting toilets and the value of culture with farmer Simon Mattsson and artist Kim Williams. Here you can listen to two excerpts from their conversation: […]
For Sunset Symphony in the Sunflowers, we’re hosting up to 200 people on the farm for an afternoon, drinking cocktails and eating canapes amongst the dual crop of sunflowers and sugarcane. Behind the scenes, many of our punters are going to want to do a wee, and perhaps few might need to poo. So how […]
Sunset Symphony in the Sunflowers is finally happening! We’ve been collaborating with farmer Simon Mattsson on this idea for ages now, ever since he first started experimenting with planting sunflowers in with his sugar cane a few years ago. This is a key event in the ongoing evolution of our Sugar vs the Reef project. […]
Kim and I are back in Mackay briefly this week. The image above shows a little something I’ve been growing since our last visit: sugar cane in my vegie garden in Wollongong! Took a while to germinate, but seems quite happy in its multi-species environment… This week we’ve got a packed schedule of meetings to […]
Just before I left Mackay, I had a great meeting with Richard, Maya and Aaron from the Mackay Botanical Gardens. I wanted to pitch them a crazy idea – a crop of sunflowers and sugar cane at the gardens. This is quite different from the usual thing you see at the Botanical Gardens. It’s big […]
This just went up on the ABC, by journalist Lara Webster. Really great news this week for the Sugar vs the Reef? project, as we began working with the Mackay Botanical Gardens towards a big work of land art – a crop of sugar cane and sunflowers – a collaboration between artists, farmers, horticulturalists, Mackay […]
This article was published in the Daily Mercury yesterday. Here’s a link to it online. And here’s a second article about the “trouble at mill” published on the same day. I have to admit, for me, trying to get my head around those articles is a bit like how my 5 year old daughter Albie […]
This is a shout out to Sonia Ball from Canegrowers, who we had a fantastic meeting with a few weeks ago. A lot of the difficult thinking in my earlier blog post emerged from our discussion with Sonia, who is the Canegrowers Manager of Communications. Canegrowers is “the principal body representing the state’s sugarcane growers”, advocating […]
