Our Mural: The Final Instalment
The Coledale Community Hall mural project is now complete!
In addition to the incredible mural that now adorns the external South-facing wall of Coledale Community Hall, the artist Brad Eastman (Beastman) also created a wallpaper mural for the inside of the hall, along with the poem from Mark Tredinnick that inspired it all.
The inside mural displays the creative minds of the local people and the amazing writing presence we have in our community.
Mark Tredinnick’s poem, Five Soft Nets: A Coledale Sonnet Cycle was written with inspiration from members of the local community who joined us in free workshops with Mark and Judi Morison.
Brad Eastman added to his creation of the vivid and unique mural on the outside of the Coledale Community Centre by creating a mural on the inside as well. Mark’s poem comes to life through the mural with emphasis on the themes of the beautiful coastal location, the unique escarpment landscape, the history of the area and the range of life forms that inhabit Coledale. Brad chose these colours to express a sense of belonging and interaction with its surroundings, as expressed in Mark’s poem.
Workshop Experience by Annaliese Hennessy
Local member Annaliese Hennessy attended the workshop and shared her thoughts on the experience:
Judi Morsion and Mark Tredinnick hosted two engaging workshops back in January – Writing Australian History, and Poetics of Place. I was fortunate enough to attend both workshops which provided fascinating discussions and insights into history, storytelling, and place. And excitingly, the conversations that occurred within the group at Mark’s workshop became the inspiration for one of Mark’s poems, a poem which has influenced Brad Eastman’s mural.
Judi spoke about Coledale. She talked about the history of Coledale – the place and its people – and who should share these stories. By writing and interacting with history we can learn, interpret, and understand ourselves, others, and significant moments of change. She asked us to consider the multitude of perspectives and voices in history and that all these voices matter. You have your own history, and your own truth, but so does everyone. Voices and their truths are not limited to people, but include the landscape, flora, and fauna. Everything tells a story.
Judi also explained the importance of research in writing history, specifically when it’s not just your own history. The research should collate and settle together in a layer of sediment before you add more, each layer holding a certain part of the history of the story you are telling. We are curious beings, Judi said, and the search for knowledge is a part of us.
Mark’s workshop was an excursion into nature poetry and the appreciation for nature in the poetic. Literature, Mark explained, taps into humanity and the core of being human, and connects strongly to a sense of place. We all gather information from place differently, picking up on and remembering different details, and it’s these details that we include in stories of a place. It’s why, as Judi suggested, listening to multiple voices is so important because together they create a complete picture of place. We need each other to explore a sense of place.
Mark spoke about how to speak place, how to communicate spaces, their details and definitions, their relationships and complexities. He discussed how to use senses to hint at the magnitude of a space, how to catch the finer elements, how to witness. Like Judi, he considers curiosity, learning, and explaining to be essential building blocks in the human psyche. We want to experience place, communicate our experience, and compare it to others. Poetry and language allow us to do this.
The last part of Mark’s workshop focused on poetry, specifically the sijo form. Mark talked about the use of form, rhythm, and white space in communicating place. We were, under Mark’s guidance, able to write, share, and workshop our own sijo. Mine became:
Afternoon heat, figs buoy on wooden lines lingering in air
damp with storms coming for lorikeets at days collapse. Rain spills,
humidity crashes, tomorrow morning there will be nets.
What we make in art, Mark says, is not a representation rather a part and participation in place. Following this way of approaching place, Mark’s poem and Brad’s mural result from experiencing Coledale, and in turn become part of the Coledale experience.