Brutal Transformations: Regenerating Canberra’s Concrete Legacy by Lymesmith champions adaptive re-use of brutalist architecture, flipping the typically grey raw concrete into colour-saturated vibrant art works.Brutal Transformations is an ongoing series featuring Canberra’s Brutalist buildings hypothetically transformed with boldly applied colour and decoration. The work aims to stimulate discussion around the use of colour in our built environment.
As a planned city, Canberra’s Brutalist architecture embodies the utopian spirit that underpinned this movement. Lymesmith champions adaptive re-use of brutalist architecture, flipping the typically grey raw concrete into colour-saturated vibrant artworks. This speculative ongoing series contemplates the collision of brutalist architecture and concrete as an exemplar of ordinariness and everyday life, with the full power of colour to camouflage, pattern and to connect to place.
Lymesmith’s 2021 and 2022 iterations of prints and paste-ups featuring well-known and less appreciated Brutalist buildings: the National Carillon, Campbell Park Offices, Deakin Offices and Robin Boyd’s Churchill Building. For 2024, Lymesmith will explore new structures with an emphasis on buildings most vulnerable to demolition in the near future.
The Cox Gallery is the ideal venue to bring together the art and architectural communities in Canberra. The Brutal Transformation project will adapt to meet the opportunity of the Cox Gallery and may take the form of paste-ups or framed prints along with an artist talk to discuss Canberra’s concrete legacy and its potential for regeneration.
Lymesmith will present an artist's talk in conjunction with Cox Gallery to further examine the role of colour in regenerating and transforming existing buildings (an alternative to carbon intensive demolition/rebuilding). The talk explores the potential of colour to enrich legacy architecture and to make explicit connections between building and landscape, and building, people and story. This talk is aimed at architects, designers, town planners, artists and people interested in the built environment.
Opening Hours | Monday to Friday 9am - 5pm
Entry to this exhibition is free | No bookings required
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Lymesmith is an artist and colour designer with 20 years’ experience working in the built environment. With a background in painting and architecture, and a passion for connecting people and place, Lymesmith exists to bring intelligent and stimulating colour and artworks into the spaces where people live, work and thrive. Founder and Director of Lymesmith, Sonia van de Haar speaks and teaches on architectural colour design. Sonia was born in Wollongong and studied painting at the School of Art and Design, ANU, and Architecture at the University of NSW.
COX Gallery is an extension of COX Architecture's creative excellence program. It supports arts practice in Canberra by providing a fee-free, commission-free exhibition space on the Kingston Foreshore. The gallery explores aspects of design, creation and connection, exhibiting the work of emerging and established artists with a connection to the Canberra Region.
Image Credit: Lymesmith | Brutal Transformations hurry to where they still bloom, 2022 | Image courtesy of the artist