Perth Voice Interactive

GREEN lasers crisscrossing the wetlands at Lake Sutherland is one of the atmospheric highlights of this year’s After Dark festival.

For the past four years the annual festival has shone a light on the Pickle District, a light industrial zone in West Perth that has become a burgeoning arts hub.

The festival is a night-time art crawl of the various galleries and studios in the Pickle District with live music, murals, giant sculptures and light installations creating an atmospheric vibe.

This year the festival is spreading its wings to the area around Lake Sutherland, transforming the banks of Lake Bunning and the cycle paths beside Graham Farmer freeway into a kaleidoscope of art, colour and light.

Leederville installation artist Sohan Ariel Hayes is busy working on his festival piece Shoreline, which is inspired by the history of the area.

“In the scraps of lands delineated by Leederville Parade and Loftus Street this new installation, Shoreline, speaks to the most dramatic era in the Pickle District post-settlement history, when the Mitchell Freeway development cut the area off from the city,” Hayes says.

“Situated in remnant wetlands of Lake Sutherland, green laser levels mounted on custom panning and tilting head cut sections through landscape and highlight the waterline.

“Intersected by weeds and grasses the levelling line is fractured into thousands of individuated points that create an immersive abstract field.”

Hayes says many of the artworks in the festival tap into the psychogeography of the area, drawing on Yabbaru Bibbulman history, old swamp lines, hydrogeological plans, the history of the Mitchell Freeway and local knowledge.

“The Pickle District is an unusual collection of spaces and people perched on an industrial fringe west of Perth City,” Hayes says. “The key automotive industries that once thrived here have departed, leaving in their wake a sprawl of warehouses that have since become occupied by the arts communities. 

“The close association of the arts and industry does not happen often, nor for long, but is exciting for all players because it opens up the possibility for creative acts to operate at scale. Before the remnants of industry die off or move on from this place, taking with it the capacity to collaborate on bigger things, it is timely, right now, to take advantage of the association.”

Hayes says one of his favourite festival artworks was a collaboration between artists and staff from the old concrete factory in the Pickle District.

“Privileging oral history, the work was an installation of crane, concrete mixer, projector and speakers choreographed to dramatise the story of a crane driver’s collision with high voltage power lines on the Drummond Place,” Hayes says.

“The concrete mixer becomes a suspended projection surface 5m above the audience and at once a surface for this story and by extension an iconic marker for the Pickle District.”

This year’s After Dark will feature light and sound installations, sculptures and murals, as well as live music from Grace Sanders, Ohhhzone, Half Child, and DJ’s Yon Jovi and Curlisu.

Art studio Voxlab, whose founder Jon Denaro played a key role in creating the Pickle District, says this year’s festival will be unique.

“We have taken over the area between the freeway interchange as a part of our Pickle District boundary,” says Voxlab’s Hayley Partington.

“This space is quite incredible as it connects the CBD to Northbridge and Leederville. There is so much to discover, with two remnant lakes and a bike path interconnecting it all together – our hope is to shine a light on the peculiar beauty that is found there.”

Supported by the CBD Revitalisation Grant Program, the festival aims to highlight walkways and cycle paths that connect to the city, and is a pilot project to light up and activate other paths and cycle networks into and out of the City of Perth.

After Dark 4.0 is on Friday September 22. It’s free entry but you have to register for a ticket at eventbrite.com.au 

by STEPHEN POLLOCK