A team including two Australian landscape architects has been shortlisted in the 2021 Tapestry Design Prize for Architects, the fourth edition of the competition run by The Australia Tapestry Workshop.
Inaugurated in 2015, the prize celebrates the connections between architectural space and tapestry design. In 2021, architects from around the world were invited to design a hypothetical tapestry or one of three sites within Sydney performing arts and gallery space, Phoenix Central Park. The prize received 141 submission from 23 countries with the jury shortlisting 15 submissions.
Landscape architects Julie Lee and Georgina de Beaujeu, in a team with graduate of architecture Madeleine Gallagher and textile artist Lis de Vries, are finalists in the competition, with their entry ‘This Place.’
“This place, and all places, are an amalgam of layers constructed from the ground up – past, present and alternate futures on display,” reads the team’s project statement. “The design draws inspiration from the building’s oculus window that connects inside to outside, with a white circular area woven into the tapestry offering a screen upon which to project images of the past, present and future. The work encourages viewers to ‘see’ the landscape and our place in it in a new way.”
An aerial view of Sydney unfolds across the tapestry, surrounding the circular point, with the location of Phoenix Central Park site identified in red. Varying textures in the weave of the tapestry signify the differing land-uses, topography and vegetation across the greater region.
In 2018, Pop Architecture and Hotham Street Ladies, including landscape architect Cassandra Chilton, won the third edition of the Australian Tapestry Workshop’s Tapestry Design Prize for Architects. Their proposal, titled Chaos and Fertility, used French Neoclassical architect Étienne-Louis Boullée’s 1784 unbuilt proposal for a cenotaph honouring physicist Isaac Newton as a site, imagining that the tapestry was the creation of the “secret sect of Diana of Ephesus” who carry out “needle work” in the “submerged, rocky base of Newton’s Cenotaph.”
This year’s prize entries were judged by a panel comprising Cameron Bruhn (dean and head of the architecture school at the University of Queensland), Diane Jones (executive director of PTW Architects), Valerie Kirk (artist and tapestry weaver), Dimmity Walker (director of Spaceagency Architects), John Wardle (founder of John Wardle Architects) and Brook Andrew (interdisciplinary artist).
The winner will be announced in a special virtual event on 26 August. An exhibition of the finalists’ designs will be held at the Australian Tapestry Workshop from 26 August to 12 November 2021.
To see all the shortlisted entries, go here.
