Beggan Beggan

“Beggan Beggan” is a visual installation and soundscape collaboration between The Ronalds, Sarah Last and Dave Burraston. 

In 2015 we were approached by Sarah Last from The Wired Lab to see if we could use our forensic photographic techniques to recreate a scale version of the heritage listed shearing shed on Beggan Beggan station near Jugiong in NSW. Of course, we said yes – having spent a disturbing amount of time investigating rural vernacular architecture and in particular, sheds.

It wasn’t until January 2017 that we visited the farm and upon looking at the scale of the shed we knew that printing a straight facsimile would be out of the question. For the past several years we had been investigating and researching perception and diaromas, creating small experiments inside shoe boxes to dissect how we experience our vision of space and reality, so naturally our thoughts turned toward installing scale models in viewing pods across the Wired Lab site. 

We also knew that we wanted to use actual reclaimed timbers and steel to create the sculpture housing, to enhance the sensual and tactile nature of these elements to help transport the viewers into the shed, adding to the illusion.

So we took the plunge and have created tiny diaromas that have been set up across the Wired Lab site in scale with the footprint of the Beggan Beggan shearing shed. Our signature low-tech site-specific, to-scale photographic sculptures are housed in custom built camera-like boxes. The boxes sit on handmade timber tripods that reflect the age of the timber used to construct the Beggan Beggan shearing shed. Bi-convex single stereo lenses and motion sensing LED lights bring the internal images to life, reflecting scenes from in and around the shed in a kind of analogue Virtual Reality.

Each box relates and converses with it neighbours having glimpses of a scene you have viewed just moments before. The boxes transport you into a virtual memory of the shed, a ghost shed, transported in space and time to a new location. Through this perception illusion you feel a sense of form where your mind fills the gaps, and imagination and reality merge to form new realities for each viewer.

 

The Ronalds are collaborating with David Burraston and myself. I really wanted to capture some of the vernacular architecture in Australian agrarian practices and a really good example of that is the shearing shed. The way they’re built, their appearance and the materials they’re built from have not changed in 200 or so years. We got access to a heritage-listed shearing shed on a property called Beggan-Beggan and The Ronalds have done a sort of forensic photographic documentation. We’re working similarly with sound; David in particular has been recording the shed when it’s in use and highly productive. He also captured the auditory signature of the building when it wasn’t in use, the changes due to environmental conditions. As the day warms up, it creaks and wonderful wind patterns pass through because they’re highly ventilated spaces. That will be an audio-visual presentation. We’ve developed lovely little boxes with lenses, each for viewing a sort of diorama of the shearing shed. The installation will be laid out in the footprint scale of the shearing shed.

An excerpt from Keith Gallasch’s interview with Sarah Last for RealTime

To hear our interview with Kids v’s Art click the link below. 

Reviews – Realtime

SUPPORTERS

THE WIRED OPEN DAY FESTIVAL and The ‘agri(culture)’ Project has been made possible by funding, sponsorship and in-kind support from State, Federal and Local government entities, Community Organisations and Private Businesses.