'BioSPHERE’ - A communal ritual gathering site.
Published on Thursday, 11 July 2024 at 1:27:21 PM
PROJECT OVERVIEW:
In October 2025 the National Ceramics Triennial will be held in Western Australia.
This is also an opportunistic time when the Grain Domes of Goomalling are empty of grain and accessible. This coincidence provides unique opportunity to invite the international ceramics community to join the people of Goomalling along with a team of internationally recognised interdisciplinary artists as we transform the surface and internal spaces of the Goomalling Grain Silos into a gigantic storytelling device.
Acknowledged in the southern hemisphere as some of the largest man-made objects recognisable from space, the Goomalling Domes rest in the earth like gigantic half buried megafauna eggs.
With the devastating loss of biodiversity right across the Wheatbelt, the domes provide a powerful external and internal canvas to project a transformative story of how we need to prioritise the remaining woodlands in this region. Through stewardship and re-wilding, we can bring back biodiversity to the region.
There are far reaching benefits to consider a future where humans feel engaged with and part of nature. It is an illusion to think that what we understand about the natural world is all there is to know about the creatures that live amongst us.
The Domes are a monumental narrative surface to remind us that in the sensory perception of other living creatures, we will find wonder in the familiar and magic in the mundane. Most importantly the Goomalling domes will tell a critical story of interconnectedness, that we need to come together as a species to prioritise other species in the biosphere. Art has the power to do this, to surprise people into a magical perspective shift.
The ritual will conclude with an ancestral dreamtime story shared through the original custodians of Goomalling, the Nyungar Boodja of Balladong country, they acknowledge the significance of the ‘Koomal’ – the silver brush tail possum of which the Goomalling township was named after.