West Coast Community Services Hub July 19 2011

Poco People are developing a public art commission for the West Coast Community Services Hub, which will integrate training and educational programmes, library and online access centre facilities and community services into a ‘one-stop shop’ for the local region.

Located in Queenstown, the construction site itself is no stranger to the pursuits of learning children or the noise of tradesmen’s machinery. The Queenstown Technical School and Mt Lyell School of Mines operated on the site from 1918 until the late ‘60s, imparting skills and information as diverse as welding, wood working, architecture and geology. The building was demolished in the ‘60s and was reborn as the West Coast Community College and later the Queenstown TAFE, carrying on the proud tradition of educating the west coast’s finest and brightest.

The artwork itself is constructed from DigiGlass, which will be used as the glass component in a balustrade that segregates two levels within the HUB, and as a four-panel raised screen that acoustically segregates the online access centre area from the cafeteria.

There are multiple themes inherent to the site and to the region that I wished to explore through this work. Ideas of self and place; exploring a complex community identity which is so thoroughly linked with the landscape. And the concept of time and change, for in the immediate site, for local industry, the landscape, the community, and the future.

I’ve long wanted to develop a project that utilises old images of the west coast. As the west coast has a rich pioneering history there are many old photographs that are archived in west coast museums, at the TMAG Rosny archives, and within the Archives Office of Tasmania and interstate collections. However I’m most interested in photographs that are owned by local residents, filed away in photo albums and privately stored in homes throughout Tasmania.

We appealed to residents to bring out as many family-owned images as possible to be used within the public art project. On 7th and 8th July, residents visited the library and had their photographs scanned, and through this process participated in the creation of the artwork. We sourced new and old photos of anything to do with the west coast: events, houses, buildings, backyards, birthday parties, the bush, mountains, animals, work, fishing, dirt bike riding.. Love the snapshot of the dogs in the wheel barrow! Other notable photos include fishing and swimming in the old King River, Telecom 4WDs getting bogged and coursing through the thick snows on Mt Reid, and of course, the obligatory photograph of the stately Mt Lyell School of Mines building.

The Mt Lyell School of Mines, date unknown.

These photographs may never be seen by the broader community. In their own right they are cultural artifacts because they document the events that shape families’ lives. Each photograph reveals a frozen, time-locked story, and collectively they imply a sense of relationships between people and narratives and histories of a community or place.

We’re now going through the time-consuming process of sorting the photographs for use in the final artwork. With construction of the building continuing the artwork should be installed in early September.