Georgia Nowak – Phase 2

The Wurundjeri word for the Yarra River is ‘Birrarung’ and so I like to refer to this as a work that sits adjoining the Birrarung. And something that is really important to recognise is that the Birrarung has now been categorised as a living entity in its own right. 

This work is called Channel and it is a public artwork that acknowledges the pollution in our stormwater and river systems. There is so much pollution that comes out of this stormwater drain and that's all the way from liquids to solids, and if we have a look at some of the Bandalong litter traps that are along the Yarra, we can start to see some of that waste and that goes all the way from polystyrene – which is one of the largest contributors to waste in the river – and that's coming from a lot of construction sites and big retailers. We see bottles, we see balls, and what we don't really see is the liquid, and some of those things are oil from cars, some of the illegally dumped grease traps that people throw down the stormwater drain because it's very easy to go, ‘well it's invisible I can't see it and I don't know where it goes so it doesn't matter.’ But yet when we stand here on the river and we can actually look into these litter traps and we see the quality of the water, we start feeling complicit in that and understanding the importance of the value of our waterways.  

Some of the things that we spoke about were able to be implemented into this particular iteration of the work and you know that as a result of that we have lots of different aquatic plants, we have snails, we have some charcoal that we've extracted from the river and all of that in combination is aimed to increase oxygen levels neutralize some of these pollutants. So over the period of 10 days as the install is sitting on Evan Walker Bridge we'll be able to see that treatment take place. One of the things that is really important for us to try and think about is seeing this tank as a mini wetland of sorts, it's just one way of treating water that is natural and trying to extract some of those systems into a very, very small work is a real opportunity for us to test whether this is viable or not. So I see this ten days is really a testing project, is this something that is viable and can it achieve something if we did amplify it or multiply it over scale? 

Test Sites was a really wonderful opportunity to engage with process and I think we're often in the visual arts thinking very much about outcome and to be able to be given time to develop ideas and workshop our research to ensure that what we did produce had merit was a really, really wonderful process to go through.  

The part of the project for Test Sites was to develop a brief that we could then speak to the City of Melbourne about that would potentially become something that we could explore further down the track. This was about a six month process of research and development which really allowed us to engage with our own thinking our own processes rather than worry too much about what the outcome may or may not be that then followed into a further commission that allowed me more time to understand the logistics of what would be involved to try and treat water.  

So in that period I was speaking to people like Melbourne Water, the EPA, ecologists to really try and figure out what the river meant to them and how in a public artwork we could try and engage with those sort of conversations.  

One of the intentions behind the work is to try and uncover some of these hidden stories and try and engage with the public around those stories that are sometimes invisible to the eye or hard to try and understand, so the attempt to deliver this message is done by making a public work that is accessible and easy to digest. So there's obviously a lot of research and a lot of scientific knowledge behind trying to treat water, however in its purest form it is really about trying to engage with a very, very basic concept which is managing our waterways and managing our river systems.