JOONDALUP-Thanks for Visiting

​

This body of work appeared as part of the 2016 Joondalup Invitation Art Award. 

 

Souvenirs are the items we carry on our person, the cheap trinkets we pick up on our travels to remind us of where we’ve gone, and were we want to go back to. Predominantly these objects are made offshore, and their manufacture removed from their place of reference. Their design is restricted to a limited series of popular icons that fail to extend past major capital cities or grandiose natural monuments. Investigating Joondalup as a historically newly established city centre, this body of work seeks to pay homage to the city as it is represented through local myth, folklore and through popular media. 

 

This body of work centres on research undertaken into how Joondalup was established, and the reasons for why the city as it exists now came to be. Joondalup was established as part of a retail redevelopment to draw strain away from the Perth city proper. Established as part of the Retail Shopping Policy by the MPRA in 1976, Joondalup remained relatively underdeveloped until the late 1980’s and early 1990’s when it started to become know as “the City in the North”. 

 

Drawing exclusively from imagery sourced from the Joondalup City Council website, each work in this series has been constructed as a souvenir homage to Joondalups’ self-representation. So Glad You Were Here, a hand knitted jumper is a tributary and celebratory representation of Joondalup as the retail centre it was designed and built to be, focusing exclusively on the gargantuan proportions of Lakeside Joondalup Shopping Centre as “the largest shopping centre in the west”. Drawing on commemorative making traditions and inspired by Australiana style knitting patterns made popular during the 1980’s this work imagines Lakeside as a similarly grand and white sailed structure to rival east coast Sydney’s Opera House as both a destination and an icon. 

 

Thanks for Visiting, renders the specific Joondalup sights and attractions into reworked and fabricated versions of popular Perth specific souvenir items. Just Wanted to Wish You Well, a hand tufted welcome mat populated with iconography sourced from Joondalup tourist specific brochures, recalls monogrammed foyer entrance carpets made popular by large financial institutions and companies. Rendered by hand and lacking the digital finesse of mass production, these items reveal their proto-typical nature and their very singular existence.