Points of Departure

The Mytho-Poetic Landscape of Cockatoo Island

Abstract

This paper describes a project entitled Points of Departure, which forms part of a practice-led research investigation into how existing urban space might be both read and written using fiction, narrative and physical interventions. Through key artists and writers such as Poe, Greenaway, Carter, and Piranesi, and a description of an interrogative design process on Cockatoo Island in Sydney, this paper offers insights into how re-mappings, narrative insinuations and operative instruments might harness forces instead of producing forms. The project work was undertaken as both a creative exploration and a pedagogic experiment: five students undertaking an intensive design studio conducted initial exploratory work, my interpretations of which provided the narrative basis for the project. Through these implied fictions, coupled with my own cartographic explorations, I generated “portraits” of the Island (conflating myth and place), which in turn generated briefs for full size instruments made by the students. Finally, responding to these instruments, I created a series of architectural vehicles.

The processes employed in the project and described here did not aim to negate the existing spatial structures of Cockatoo Island but rather acted as an aleatoric, dissonant shifting of parameters to create dynamic relationships between place and its constituents. These imperfect reflections of place created a fluid field of multiple representations, an indeterminate space that prompted novel points of departure for spatial experiences. At the same time they invited an active individual response – a ‘wandering’. This wandering, in which reality is discursive and space and ritual are imperfectly conflated, provokes personal interpretations of space. These disconnected moments of understanding, this paper suggests, offer speculative re-interpretations acting on urban territories in pursuit of spatial openness, generative processes, and ultimately the means by which we can actively perform and participate in the city.

Read the full article online at: https://drawingon.org/Issue-01-08-Points-of-Departure