Historic Spots

Site-responsive Art, Land Art, Environmental Art,

The language of gardens is employed as a medium to express the previous environments embedded in the Abbotsford Convent Arts Precinct, highlighting how landscapes may be overlaid with different cultural habitation and meaning.

The artwork is made up of three circular garden beds positioned in various places in the garden, contained by picket fences. The vegetative contents and location of each garden bed refer to a historical time and place. Outside the Wurundjeri Land Council  Indigenous plants refer to the land shaped by thousands of generations of Aboriginal land management. On the lawn a picket fence topped with axe heads surrounds clipped lawn symbolises the clearing of the site by pastoralists Curr and Orr. Towards the back of the site crucifix topped pickets surrounds a planting of vegetables, referring to the time when food gardens tended by the Sisters of the Good Shepherd overlaid the space. The contemporary artworks contribute a new layer again.