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                    Recent projects

                    Test Sites gives artists the opportunity, knowledge and support to explore, experiment and develop creative ideas for projects in the public realm.

                    Test Sites has supported more than 70 artists since 2016. Find out more about recent project tests we have supported through this program.

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                    Test Sites 2023 – Round 2

                    Samantha Thompson  

                    Stop & play: Play like your life depended on it: Samatha’s practice considers play and how to make adults more inclined to be playful. Stop & Play uses dress ups, referred to as ‘playsuits’, to inspire adults to take a moment to play and frolic, to remember what it’s like to give yourself permission to be joyful and try something new.

                    Sally Walk 

                    Art treasure hunt: fostering a sense of curiosity and adventure this project test encouraged participants to explore the city to find hidden keys that unlocked one of ten handmade ceramic sculptures.

                    HABIT (Hannah Zhu & Bryn Murrell) 

                    Push/Pull: a series of operable domestic doorways in the Flagstaff Gardens, where the public is invited to open, peek into, travel through or even shy away from.

                    Melissa Hermans  

                    This is a urinal: a bronze urinal bowl used by the public to create a reaction resulting in oxidising and coloring the bronze surface.

                    Jade Armstrong 

                    Urban serenity: Illuminating moments of calm: this installation bathes viewers in pink light, to create a moment of relaxation amidst the bustling urban landscape of Melbourne’s city.

                    Jina He 

                    Aeolian Echoes: an interactive installation that transforms wind into melody, engaging communities and fostering a vibrant atmosphere for all to enjoy.

                    Emile Zile 

                    Two Minute Art (Charity Mugger) [working title]: a street-level multimedia performance that delivers unique art experiences on urban terrain. Using the direct approach mode of a ‘Charity Mugger’ or ‘Chugger’, Art Muggers engage the public in personalised one-on-one art experiences.

                    Jincheng Deng  

                    Here they are: the top portion of a conventional flagpole has been altered to mimic a flag's form, encouraging a reconsideration of the flag’s essence.

                    Emily Parsons-Lord 

                    Falling to pieces (working title): a thought project to erase architectural icons by enveloping them in a cloud of mist and plant distress pheromone.​

                    Test Sites 2023 – Round 1

                    Stephen Phillips (5AngryMen) ​​

                    All Together Now…: a human installation project using In-Ear-Monitoring technology. 

                    Tamara Tallent ​

                    The Great Australian Fairytale: inspired by the nursery rhyme, There was an old woman who lived in a shoe, this is an installation made from shoe boxes, houses the stories of many without a home. 

                    Axel Garay ​​

                    Nehushtan: a public video projection and performance installation designed for the entrance to the Royal Melbourne Hospital. 

                    Matthew Fung ​

                    Market full of dreams: the artist's production of an advertisement to reclaim and reconstruct the lost past by memory. The fragments of memory form a poignant advertisement on migration and a parallel 'Australian Dream'. 

                    Sonia Zymantas ​

                    Saturday Morning: participatory signs and sounds art installation based on ABS 2016 & 2021 SEIFA data. 

                    Deborah Ladd ​

                    The aEye: an interactive artwork based around AI technology. 

                    Nicholas Millen ​

                    Working Holiday Observed: this work considered boundaries and intersecting thresholds between work, rest and leisure. 

                    Peter Berzanskis ​

                    Thresholds: this artwork seeks to arrest and perplex pedestrians semiconsciously transiting through liminal spaces, taking them out of their train of thought to stop, do a double take, and imaginatively engage with the space for a moment. 

                    Gloria Sulli 

                    Tell the Wind: inflatable sculpture powered by the wind channeled on the Seafarers Bridge, Docklands,  

                    Chantelle Mitchell

                    Hydrophonic Resonance (Babble): an interactive public art installation facilitating communication, connectivity and empathy through listening to waterways.​

                    Test Sites 2022

                    Adam Coutts

                    MASS: a Queer video art piece celebrating queer identities.

                    Carla Zimbler

                    a glimpse of you: an alternative secular grieving space and responsive sound-sculpture as a conduit for connection, social interchange and collective mourning.

                    Dr Desiree Hernandez Ibinarriaga

                    In Lak’ech: a project founded in the meaning, interaction and intervention in public spaces. In Lak’ech involves sharing culture, values and knowledge between First Nations, immigrants and the publics through furniture-sculpture interaction, intervention and painting of the In Lak’ech furniture-sculpture and shape abstraction in paper.

                    Ella Pi​ninta​

                    To Exist is to Occupy: giant spikes covered in grassy materials, blocking a laneway. This artwork is about re-contextualising the language of defence and overriding it by turning it into an absurd, even playful experience. 

                    James Price​

                    Warning/Wanted/Lost/Help: a series of signs that are funny, absurd, dumb, brilliant and confounding in the best possible way.

                    Kasey Gambling

                    The Hotline: an audio based work allowing callers to explore narratives on reproductive healthcare via a phone menu with each user creating their own choose-your-own-adventure style narrative. Satirising anti-choice pregnancy helplines, The Hotline explores how patriarchal Western medicine impacts those experiencing reproductive health issues. 

                    Nicole Xu

                    A/Historical Ground: a propositional user/land relationship in which a new typology of public space is formed – one where people are allowed and encouraged to engage with and alter the matters of the ground freely.

                    STATHIS//DAVEY//KIM​​​

                    A Fleeting Chorus: set against the stunning backdrop of New Quay Marina at dusk A Fleeting Chorus is a majestic sound and light performance projected over the water by a flotil​la of boats.​​


                    Test Sites 2021: Round 2

                    ​Abbey Rich

                    (Princes Park) Redefined: a relational project that responds to unsafe and unsettling public space that seeks to empower survivors of sexual assault to reimagine how we can work together to create temporary public artworks.  

                    GEOFADE Devika Bilimoria and Luna Mrozik gawler

                    T-minus: a time rehabilitation clinic offering ‘temporal adjustments’ to adult participants in an immersive multi-room facility fusing live-art, interactive design, therapeutic practices and ecology, to relieve the anxieties of an epoch in which time appears to be running out.

                    George Goodnow

                    Tumbleweed: a temporary, sculptural installation that travels to multiple sites before undergoing a recycling process. The work disrupts the everyday and invites audiences to consider how familiar objects and activities can be reimagined in order to create a more sustainable future. 

                    Jia Jia Chen

                    New Gold Fountain: celebrates water as a resource and the public drinking fountain through the embellishment of the utilitarian stainless steel drinking feature with an abstracted re-interpretation of Chinese ‘Blue and White’ porcelain.  

                    Joy Zhou

                    A Creek Chat: a sound-based temporary public art intervention amplifying the William’s Creek underground waterway in Melbourne’s CBD. 

                    Kate Golding

                    Cooks’ Cottage camera obscura: a temporary site-specific installation inside Cooks’ Cottage in Fitzroy Gardens, that operates as a counter-monument responding to settler colonial mythmaking and contested histories by disrupting Captain Cook's legacy and the mainstream acceptance of monological narratives. 

                    Megan Hunter

                    Pathway to Water: a series of five vibrant colourful paintings highlighting the importance of our natural waterways, celebrating native Australian wildlife and encouraging others to care about environmental sustainability.

                    Michael Prior

                    What to Expect: a sound-based walking game for all ages – walking, rolling, or dancing through space creates an endless sound composition. ​

                    Test Sites 2021: Round 1

                    ​Aarti Jadu​

                    Embodiments: a modular multi-speaker installation sonically emulating the shape of a human body, scaled up to fit the size of a thoroughfare, proposed for pathways surrounding construction sites.

                    Georgia Banks

                    Remains to be Seen: a reality TV show that doesn’t exist – all the trappings of reality TV without an actual show. The premise of this ‘show’ is that the winner will receive complete control over my funeral and the disposal of my body when I die (this will actually happen).

                    Georgia Nowak

                    Channel: is an ‘active’ sculpture in that it tests and treats polluted water, inviting audiences to view the work over a period of months as it cycles through a treatment process. 

                    J. Rosenbaum

                    Evolving Faces of Melbourne: is a public AI project exploring the collections of Melbourne institutions and the concept of shifting the AI away from the images of the past, towards a representation of today.

                    Jenny Zhe Chang

                    Light with Hope: is a public art project using traditional bamboo steamers and modern safety mesh as materials to create symbolised miner’s lamps, intending to deliver a message of safe venturing into the unknown and seeking a better life. 

                    Juliet Miranda Rowe

                    91 – 21: a curated, site-responsive, animation program upon reflection and celebration of the 30th anniversary of Melbourne Central’s Iconic Marionette Pocket Watch.

                    Lauren Dunn

                    Overhead Overground: is a playful but political suite of neon text works, snippets of overheard conversations relating to current consumption trends.

                    Marta Figueiredo and Jonathon Griggs

                    Tree Spirit: a temporary interactive sculpture of an artificial tree that expresses our emotional connection with Nature through the presence of a ‘nature sprite’ who has witnessed the outcome of our current path in relation to the environment.

                    Matthew Fung

                    The Talking Wall: transforms the notion of a dividing barrier into a signifier for new opportunities and connection. It will be a cultural laboratory for multi- disciplinary artists and communities to actualise their collaboration through an architectural installation.

                    Matthew Johnson

                    DreamScape01_Technicolour: curious farm of light, sound and steel... Arrive and awaken your senses to the DreamScape. Dynamic palettes of slowly shifting colour, a panning chorus of synth sounds and pulses of mechanical smoke greet entranced spectators.

                    Mel Deerson and Briony Galligan

                    Making Rainbows: a site-specific project including installation, sound-works and a pop-up bookshop exploring childhood, bookstores and rainbows, figured as both glimmering and dangerous.

                    Morwenna Schenck

                    Duty of Care is a public artwork in two parts, delivering short acts of conservation through seed propagation, providing publics an opportunity to encounter and connect with critically endangered flora species from various Victorian bio-regions.

                    OFFICE

                    Commodified attempts to reveal the commodification and extraction of wealth from land as well as the transaction of limited public assets for increased developer profit, beginning with colonisation up to the present day.

                    Rhys Ryan and Emily Boutard

                    WITNESS: an ultra-realistic ‘window’ into the courthouse by broadcasting replicas and re-enactments of its interior on a large digital screen fixed to the outside of the building.  

                    Samantha Martin

                    The Waiting Game is a large-scale, sculptural and multi-functional installation bead maze toy and public art project that aims to bring resonating symbolism to the window views of patients in hospitals and care facilities.  

                    Stephania Leigh

                    Body Swivel: an interactive sculptural installation which explores feminised architectural forms and spaces, placed in juxtaposition to the overwhelming number of male sculptural spaces within the CBD.

                    Trent Crawford and Matthew Ware

                    Divine Intervention: a multifaceted temporary public art project exploring the intersection between spirituality and technology in which an inflatable greenhouse filled with smiley face helium balloons will be resurrected as a powerful beacon of hope. ​

                    Test Sites Phase 2

                    In 2021 the City of Melbourne's Test Sites program expanded to give selected Test Sites online graduates additional support to further develop and test their public art project ideas. 

                    Test Sites Phase 2 was co-produced by City of Melbourne and Testing Grounds and curated by Arie Rain-Glorie. The resulting projects were presented as part of the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art’s Who’s Afraid of Public Space? program. A trace object from this project was also presented at the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, in Project Space: The Hoarding. ​

                    Find out more about our Phase 2 artists and projects​​​

                    Aarti JaduEmbodiments

                    Georgia NowakChannel 

                    Jenny Zhe Chang,  Light with Hope 

                    Morwenna Schenck​, Duty of Care ​​

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