Fuzzy Felt Play
Playtime at Bundanon Art Museum, Illaroo, NSW.
Inspiration takes many forms. You can go to a hundred art exhibitions yet be more captivated by playing in joyful abandon with children’s art activities.
This happened to me when I visited Bundanon Art Museum to see the exhibition Thinking together: Exchanges with the natural world. I had come especially to see the cardboard house installation Reflections/Habitations by Alfredo and Isabel Aquilizan. It filled the gallery in a grand scale.
However when I walked outside I saw small tables in a childrens’ area set up for fuzzy felt play. The felt colours were vibrant and the shapes interesting. They reminded me of Henri Matisse’s vibrant paper works The Cut Outs where he cut shapes from papers painted in gouache to create his compositions.
I sat down on a tiny stool like Alice in Wonderland and experienced a childish delight in moving coloured shapes around on a felt board. It unlocked my childhood memories of art play which was all about having fun with no expectations or outcome.
The felts I used as a child were dull colours on a black background. This bright pink felt background meant that all the other colours that were added ‘sang’ in vivid contrast. I had such fun creating a simple landscape with a white tree, blue clouds and orange upside down hills! Seeing the landscape as a series of colours and shapes was liberating!
In the old building which housed some of Arthur Boyd’s library was a video about the artist and how Boyd’s childhood influenced his art. It explained how many of Boyd’s landscapes were populated by a pantheon of mythological figures expressing his inner emotional demons. His Shoalhaven landscapes painted later in his life were by contrast mostly filled with bright sunlight.
Bundanon Art Museum was definitely worth the 22 km long and windy drive into the bush from Nowra. The 1,100 hectares of land was gifted to the Australian people by Arthur Boyd and his wife Yvonne in 1993. It is huge, with the Art Museum in one section and the arttist’s old homestead and art studios in another part of the site.
The homestead was closed the day of my visit, so I was only able to visit the Art Museum and the Bridge (boutique guest accomodation). As we drove through quite dense bushland, I kept thinking of the 2019/2020 bushfires when I also visited the Shoalhaven region and how the close the Currowan bushfire came to Bundanon site.
The art collection had to be relocated to a climate controlled storage facility off site in early January 2020 as bushfires ringed the area. It wasn’t until heavy rain in February extinguished the fires that it was deemed safe to reopen Bindanon to the public. You can read the amazing story of Relocating the Bundanon Collection during those tense days.
Reflections/Habitations installation of cardboard dwellings by Alfredo and Isabel Aquilizan at Bundanon.
View of the Shoalhaven River seen through windows of Arthur Boyd’s library with video of the artist at work.
