Beechworth Bienniale, Victoria Australia

For the 2026 Beechworth Biennial I wanted to create a work that could incorporate the Bircher building courtyard site in unique way; not just as an interesting backdrop to some visiting object. I found the site very intriguing especially the sensation of being observed evoked by the dozens of vertical sash windows that surround the space.

In response I painted a series of rectangles including parallelograms and trapezoids on to at least two thirds of the 225sqm area arranged in differing orientations, over lapping and in sequence. My rectangles were intended to represent the shadows of the countless people who have gazed through the windows that surround the space; not just patients but the entire Beechworth community associated with it: from the doctors, nurses, interns and administrators to the cooks, cleaners and maintenance people.

Victor Stoichita points out in A Short History of the Shadow “shadows are, so to speak, heavy, dark, and…for the Greeks, the shadow was one of the metaphors for the psyche, the soul. A dead person’s soul was compared to a shadow.”

By asking my viewers to make connections between the dark criss crossing shapes on the courtyard lawn and the surrounding architecture I’m placing my installation within a succession of artists from ancient Athens to Van Eyck and Andy Warhol who grappled with the depiction and meanings of shadows in their works.

Another consideration to take into account is just how intensely pre-modern buildings especially inaccessible and decayed sites evoke human presences. The answer lies in the ratio of these windows which mimic the ratio of the human body.

Architect Auguste Perret, a college to Modernist designer Le Corbusier maintained that the vertical window expressed the human body, framing it in an anthropomorphic, primordial relationship with the outside world. Modern buildings retain little of this with their horizontal glass facades. They remain enigmatic and offer little more than reflections. The windows into the wards, offices and dormitories of Mayday Hills are just the opposite, we cannot help but imagine who may have been framed by them even when the much of the place has been barely occupied for decades.

“What one can see out in the sunlight is always less interesting than what goes on behind a windowpane.
In that black or luminous square life lives, life dreams, life suffers.” Charles Baudelaire