Kaldor Public Art Projects Announces Winner of ‘Your Very Good Idea’

The winning artwork of the latest Kaldor Public Art Project has been announced, and it's no small feat. Winner of KPAP's 45th anniversary project competition, 'YOUR VERY GOOD IDEA', local Indigenous artist Jonathan Jones will create a full-scale replica of the Garden Palace in Sydney's Botanic Gardens — a structure which burned down under suspicious circumstances in 1882. The forthcoming work, entitled Barrangal dyara (skin and bones), will be a temporary installation consisting of the bare structures of the forgotten building. And, though the work seems minimalist and unobtrusive, the ideas it represents evoke something much larger.

Though the Garden Palace was only standing for three years, it contained a great deal of significant Indigenous artefacts. Part museum, part gallery, the Palace was a proud home to much of Australia's early colonial history. Though the source of the fire was not known, rumours circulated that wealthy local residents could be involved due to their complaints the building blocked their harbour views. "It would be like someone torching the art gallery, the MCA and the Mitchell library today," the artist told SMH this morning.

With the history of the site, the conceptual implications of Jones' artwork are more than clear. A melancholy monument to cultural erasure, Barrangal dyara has a deep resonance with the nature of Indigenous history at large. In fact, though the work was this morning compared to Christo and Jeanne-Claude's 1961 Kaldor project Wrapped Coast, it has stronger similarities with more overtly political pieces like Sophie Calle's Detachment series.

After the fall of the Berlin Wall, Calle travelled around newly-reunited Germany documenting the sites where various GDR monuments had previously stood. Photographing the now empty spaces, Calle asked local residents to narrate their memory of the space as it had once been. Exploring the swift political change and cultural erasure of the time, Calle's artworks stood as testament to the ever-present nature of memory.

While similar in concept, it's telling that Jones' work won't have such intimate narration. The people who witnessed the structure burn are now long gone, and those who were affected by it have long been rendered voiceless. The white bones of the Palace will no doubt offer a stark reminder of this — the skeletons we like to keep hidden in our national closet.

Barrangal dyara (skin and bones) was unanimously chosen as the winning artwork by a panel of judges this morning. The project is scheduled for completion in 2016.