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My name is Nien Schwarz and I created this site-specific work for Dialogues With Landscape.
The work's called Radicle, that's spelt r-a-d-i-c-l-e and radicle is the first bit of growth that
emerges from a germinated seed.
I enjoyed responding to this brief to create a work on site at UWA. My relationship to
the University of Western Australia is that it's constantly sending out invitations to
the broader community to come out and hear researchers speak, many from interstate and
overseas. So it's really a hot bed of research and of communication, and in that sense, the
university is a seedbed for innovation, the cultivation of new ideas, new knowledge and
new theories.
And in that sense, I've created a nursery here, a nursery full of seedlings, 100 plants
that are indigenous to Western Australia. I think quality of research really requires
good nourishment and nurturing environments, and I've tried to allude to that by swaddling
each plant in a sleeping bag. Attached to each plant is a blue piece of flagging tape
that identifies the genus of the plant. But it also has written on the yellow piece of
flagging tape the title of a research publication. So in that sense, it's a nursery for plants,
but it's also a nursery for developing research and cultivating new ideas and sharing that
in research groups or in schools or in faculties. So the colours of the research clusters are
associated with the degree colours of that particular faculties. So in this case, we've
got red associated with medicine and wellbeing, and it's one of twelve colours in this work.
It's very much a site-specific work. I also made it in response to Reid Library and I
see these research clusters as little annexes off the library, a database or cross section
of research from these different faculty areas. So there are probably more than 500 names
of UWA staff and students involved within this work.
I'm really grateful for the opportunity to have created this work. It's been such an
enjoyable process to work with so many people in the university here. And it's also been
wonderful working with the Dialogues With Landscape team, it's really been a very enjoyable
experience.