RECENT COMMISSIONS and foster care

Genesis Baroque 2023 Season
Genesis Baroque

Poems & Romances, 2023
Melbourne Chamber Orchestra

The remaking of things
NGV commission for Melbourne Now 2023

A closer look at two recent commissions, and one still very much in progress, all to the backcloth of wildlife foster care.

First up, four collages for four performances, created for Genesis Baroque’s 2023 season.

Within the collages you will find, a golden wreath of laurel and oak branches ca. 1760–70; one of the nine female figures that personified the arts, the ‘marble head of a young woman, perhaps a muse’, 3rd–2nd century BC; floral pieces from Atelier Martine, c. 1914; a glass slide from the Netherlands, dating 1907–30, from the circle of Aldophe Burdet; ‘The Edge of the Forest’ by August Heinrich, ca. 1820 for that open meadow view; a large Italian floral wreath from the mid-19th century; and flitting between all four, Australian fairy wrens.

The first concert, La Tromba, “express[ing] the splendour and grace of the Italian Baroque” is coming up on the 19th of March at the Good Shepherd Chapel, Abbotsford Convent. Follow the sound of the trumpet!

From Torelli and Grossi to Glazunov and Shostakovich, Poems & Romances is now also out in the wild.

Since creating the artwork for Melbourne Chamber Orchestra’s 2021 season, we were commissioned to create the artwork and design for MCO’s first recording, Poems & Romances.

Within the digital collage, you can see curls of yellow tulip petals (by Cornelis van Noorde, 1741 – 1795), a gathering of treetops from several compositions, a swirl of water, but it could equally be clouds, such is the inkblot, and the luminous full moon (as harnessed by Warren de la Rue) from The moon : considered as a planet, a world, and a satellite (by James Nasmyth, 1874), bring you Beethoven, Chausson, and Crellin.

It is always a delight (and a sweet relief) holding the printed work in hand (pictured below, interspersed between the not so daily walks), and this proved the rule true.

Please head over to MCO to order a copy and see and, more importantly, hear for yourself.

Our third commission, The remaking of things, is still in progress for the remainder of the summer, but it is at the build a model of the gallery space stage of coming into being. This model helps us to see what you will see when you are in the middle of the room, that John Lewin’s Three-toe king-fisher (Azure kingfisher) is indeed in the middle of a doorway and a White-breasted honey-sucker is in the other one.

With the collage illuminated to reflect twenty-four hours in a Grey-headed flying fox colony compressed into twenty-four minutes, we’ve been thinking about how the components will change appearance depending upon how they are coloured. As we clean around the digital edges of snail etchings and kangaroo paperweights, pieces continue to fall into place.

Also falling into place, but landing like a leaf with a flutter, our seventh Grey-headed flying fox pup for the season. Esme (pictured here at just eight-days-old), was found on a driveway, unharmed, but exhausted. She is so young that her tummy is still bald, which would have allowed her to have been warmed through connection with her mum’s body (she cannot thermoregulate until she is about four-weeks-old). She has five feeds a day (a tiny 4 ml of bat formula per feed), with extra water in between as needed.

It will be many months in care before she is ready to join the colony, but like Monty and Myrtle, Fred and Pelé, we are happy to be alongside them until it is time.

While Esme is at the beginning of her journey, we recently, we paid our last visit to Ada and friends, at the end of their journey from foster care to soft release.

As they were no longer in their soft release trailer, we removed the rope that lead to it and closed the hatch. We climbed up the Red Gum to check on them, and gave them a sprig from the nearby Sugar Gum the fiddler beetles were enjoying, and wished them well. We tied the rope instead from the nearby wattle, whose canopy connects to their tree, across to another nest box up high in a Grey Box.

Lifting the lid of the nest box, we could see Hilda squished in the corner, with Violet in the top right, and possibly Ada below them both as a mattress. Agnès has not been sighted for some time, but we think she’s out there, high up in a Red Gum or Grey Box of her own. Perhaps she’s located one of the other nest boxes. Perhaps she’s made a drey of her own design. They all looked so well and healthy, and with all the delicious leaves around them, of course they are. It has been a heart-warming release.

We’ll be back again in March to release a second group of ringtails with the Koala Clancy Foundation. Remember Sid, Noodles, Finnius, and Feeney? It’s their turn next.

Commissions and wildlife foster care really do go paw in paw it seems.

Image credit: Gracia Haby & Louise Jennison, Poems & Romances, 2023, especially for Melbourne Chamber Orchestra