In May he helped Ample Projects bring the Vivid festival to life in Chatswood by creating colourful, larger than life octopus characters beamed onto buildings.
And soon Leura-based animation designer and producer Tom Taylor (right) will bring his own mini-version of Vivid to the facade of Katoomba’s Carrington Hotel.
The Culturescape digital animation festival, to be held on Saturday, October 3, is one of six innovative projects awarded a share of the $50,000 funding pool in council’s City of the Arts Trust grants program.
“The idea is to invite everyone in the Blue Mountains community, of all ages, to create and submit art for Culturescape to make it really inclusive and diverse,” Mr Taylor said.
“We’ll create templates for people to use, which they will be able to download and print.
“Blue Mountains Cultural Centre director Paul Brinkman and Katoomba installation artist Susan Victor will help me select which artworks to use, but my main body of work will be to combine all of that into an animated sequence of events to be projected onto the Carrington Hotel by KFM Media.
“The Carrington plans to put on live, electronic style music to respond to the animations and also run a night market.
“It seemed to me like the obvious place to kick this project off, but if it is successful we’ll hopefully hold more events in more locations.”
Mr Taylor will launch a website for the project next week, but has already created a Facebook page at www.facebook.com/Culturescape-BlueMountains.
There were 17 applications for this year’s arts grants program.
A panel of seven members of the Trust’s advisory committee assessed each on quality, innovation and scope to build capacity within the local arts sector by engaging the public.
Together, the six chosen projects showcase music, storytelling, writing, dance, visual arts, digital and audio-visual media production.
Culturescape, under the auspices of Blue Mountains Artists Network, received a $7,000 grant.
Other successful projects include:
- $10,000 for artist/curator Susan Cochrane to design a haunted house themed event at Woodford Academy featuring visual, performing and sound artists, wearable art and sculpture.
- $10,000 for the Blue Mountains Aboriginal Culture and Resource Centre to create a contemporary Aboriginal dance to be performed at preschools, schools and other local venues;
- $9,500 for percussionist and composer Peter Kennard to develop musical compositions and choreography that cross cultures, from Turkey and India to Greece and western classical influences, for a series of local performances;
- $7,500 for Modern Art Projects to produce an exhibition of contemporary art at local sites of architectural significance; and
- $6,000 for Varuna The Writers’ House to commission five writers to produce essays about significant Blue Mountains sites to feature in an online encyclopaedia of greater Sydney’s history.
The Trust’s chairman, Clr Don McGregor, said since it was established in 2000 the Trust would have contributed more than $1 million to the development of the Blue Mountains arts scene, “which is going in leaps and bounds at the moment”.
“Artists should be congratulated for their work and everything they put into this city,” Clr McGregor said.
