I love this tapestry.
It hangs just outside the La Trobe Reading Room in Melbourne’s State Library and each time I walk down the stairs I admire it. Not only are the colours striking, but it’s this beautiful representation of my own neghbourhood. It says so much more eloquently than I can manage in words what I feel about where I live.
Though my few blocks of the CBD are so far from the images of suburban neighbourhood—the sort of community in which I was raised—it’s still a neighbourhood, a place full of residential memory, story and life. The longer one lives in a place like this the more one comes to know that life. This tapestry celebrates that fact. There’s a richness to it that the ‘weaving’ both represents and embodies. It’s beautiful.
Title: Spring Street End
Design: indigenous artist Ben McKeown
Weavers: Pamela Joyce, Milly Formby and Emma Sulzer (2010/11)
Description: ‘It represents a reimagining of the Spring Street end of Robert Hoddle’s grid plan for the streets of Melbourne.’
SIMPLY SIMON 