2019 | Canberra Microparks
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  • Culture | The Nations Capital | Geometric images sources from Canberra buildings and city planning

  • Environment | The Garden City | Colour palette sourced from Canberra Wildflowers

  • Community | A City of Immigrants | Data generated (Census 2016) geometric abstraction of Canberra’s cultural diversity


Artists Statement | Jodie Cunningham

Culture |  Environment | Community

National >Local

The suite of geometric abstract art works I have developed for the Canberra Microparks Project were created to reflect Canberra’s culture, natural  environment, and community; referring the identity of Canberra from a national and local perspective. 

Culture | The Nation’s Capital

Essential to Canberra’s identity is its role as the Nation’s Capital. Canberra is a designed city, created specifically to house Parliament and be the centre for Australian democracy. Geometric forms are created from the Parliament House flag pole as a symbol of Australian democracy.

Environment  | The Garden City

Walter Burley Griffin and Marion Mahony Griffin’s design for Canberra envisaged a ‘Garden City’ which maximised and accentuated Canberra’s native flora. This design choice is reflected in the palette used for these art works. This palette is based upon wildflowers that inhabit the local bushland and previously occupied the spaces of the urban environments we reinvigorate and activate through the Micropark project. Intense hues of  yellows, purples, pinks and oranges from flowers like  Wattle, Bluebell, Canberra Bells, Yam Flowers, Kangaroo Grass and native orchids are combined with tertiary greens of their foliage to create a vibrant energetic palette.

Community | Local Cultural Diversity

Canberra is a community of immigrants, drawn from all over the nation and overseas. Bar-charts, pie charts, fans and radiating concentric circles are created using data sets from the 2016 Census that describe the cultural diversity of Canberra’s people in relation their birthplace and ancestry.  Some Microparks reference the diversity of entire population of Canberra while others reference the data for specific local districts.

Combination of symbolism: ‘democracy flowers’ & ‘diversity flowers’

Geometrics forms are created from the abstracted Parliamentary flagpole and the hexagons, concentric circles and triangles from the Walter Griffin and Marian Mahony Griffin plans of Canberra. Multiple ‘Geometric Cards (Geo Cards)’ are coloured according to the wildflower palette, becoming ‘Democracy Flowers’ which are combined in different combinations to the micropark concept artworks. These vibrantly coloured ‘Democracy Flowers’ use diagonal lines to create diamond forms - ‘Canberra Jewels’ - which become the new wildflowers reinhabiting the urban spaces the source flowers once grew in. Democracy Flower ‘Geocards’ and Diversity Flower data visualizations are combined together in concept artworks for each district that inform the murals and mosaics, forms, furniture and colour palette for each micropark.