Boorna Waanginy | The Trees Speak
Immersive installation night walk
Kings Park Botanical Garden
Originally commissioned by Wendy Martin
Director of Perth International Arts Festival 2016-2019
Directed by Nigel Jamieson and Richard Walley
Artist Associate & Design: Zoe Atkinson
Artist Associate & Animation: Sohan Ariel Hayes
Attendance : 210,000 (2019)
In 2015, I was invited to serve as Artistic Associate & Media Artist to Nigel Jamieson on a series of Perth Festival openings under the overall Artistic Direction Wendy Martin. For 2017 festival, in the second year of this tenure we developed The Trees Speak / Boorna Waanginy.
It was an immersive night walk through Kings Park that stretched over 1.5km.
The work was organised under five acts and included two sections of procession and two sections of rest where the audience called sit in a grassed clearing and watch the work unfold on a panoramic bank of trees or around the banks of a natural amphitheatre and a pool.
The first section was a highly immersive and startling transformation of Frasers Avenue, the iconic 750 meter long cathedral like avenue of trees that leads the audience into the Park.
There was a section on creation stories and a procession through rare and endangered species section of the park, we called Extinctions.
The work climaxes with ‘Seeds of Change’, an epic installation created in association with 3,000 young people across the state, each ‘seed’ representing a species that has been adopted as a ‘totem’.