Since returning from my New York/Montreal adventures I have been pretty sewn up with this Esky project I worked on with a fellow architect friend from Melbourne, Christie Petsinis. What is Esky you ask? Esky is an inflatable, nomadic structure that travelled to different locations and parasited onto different events during the recent Next Wave Festival.

The idea behind Esky came from attending the previous Next Wave festival and noticing at a huge opening everyone was outside, around the trestle table with buckets of beer, rather than looking at the art inside. Art openings and festivals in general are equally about the social side as seeing the art, so instead of making art to compete with the bar, we decided to make the art the bar.

The inflatable structure was handmade by myself with Alice Krueger over many months. I seem to remember a hazy blur of sewing and sewing and sewing… Neither of us had any experience in making inflatables- or sewing skills for that matter- so there was a lot of high school maths, guess work and lateral thinking involved. Christie did a fantastic job of organising heaps of amazing sponsors from small and mostly local businesses who were all really incredible and supportive of the project.
We also had a crazy time as the festival brought on a risk assessment officer a few weeks before the festival and we had to hire an engineer to certify the structure [!] and fire fighters, security guards, have everything tagged by an electrician… it was “an experience!”. Not to mention Nylex [the company that owns the trademark on the word “esky” has asked us not to call it “Esky” post festival- so from now on Esky is known as “Schmigloo”.

There’s a bunch of pictures on the website, including when we used the inflatable Schmigloo as a screening dome! www.whereisesky.com/pictures
Also Esky will also be on the cover of the next Architecture Victoria.

Life after Esky….

Now I have just arrived in Indonesia where I am doing a residency with Zanny Begg (we have a long term collaborative project together www.2016archiveproject.com). The residency is through Asialink and is at the Indonesian Visual Art Archive in Yogyakarta.

I hope to be updating my website whilst I’m over here with these projects and an online version of the Zine fair program I made for the MCA last month. (if I can battle the dial-up connection here)

[above from video screening inside Esky 31st May]