Parallel with our work in Mackay, Kim Williams and I are doing a research trip to USA to meet with artists whose work is like ours (or vice versa) – trying to soak up methods and share ours with them. Today was special – we visited Newton Harrison (of http://theharrisonstudio.net/) in Santa Cruz. The Harrison […]
Our new project has begun! It’s called Watershed: Mackay Regional Botanic Gardens Land Art Project. To celebrate, we’ve created a new website to post updates about the progress of our planting of legumes, sugarcane and sunflowers. Check out the website here.
In 2016 Lucas met with Richard Brown, director of Mackay Regional Botanic Gardens, to propose The Botanic Gardens Land Art Project. Over the past year, we’ve had several meetings with Botanic Gardens staff and we’ve gone through a process of negotiation, proposal writing and revision. John Sweet and Simon Mattsson have worked with us closely […]
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. […]
It’s mid-March, and we’re back in Mackay to have meetings with quite a few people and organisations. It’s very hot and humid and locals are saying that although there’s been some rain, the usual wet season of March hasn’t really happened. Simon Mattsson, our main cane-farmer collaborator, is hoping for some rainfall for his […]
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 […]