Windswept

Concept Themes

Windswept wraps the west facade of the new Performing Arts Centre at Alkimos Senior College in a canopy of tilting perforated panels, a screen that carries the weather of this coast in its skin. The facade is the Centre's main public interface with the wider community, and the artwork gives it a bold civic identity: a beacon and landmark, leading people in.

Alkimos lives with the ocean. The ever-present coastal winds, the repeating weather systems and persistent oceanic currents, the rhythmic circulation of swells and tides, the drifting sandbars and the rippling wind driven sand patterns of the shore: these are the invisible yet tangible natural energies that touch daily life here, and Windswept sets out to make them recognisable. Its shapes, rhythms, textures and patterns are all sourced in the local natural world. For Rick Vermey the connection is personal, drawn from a childhood on the sands and in the water between Quinns Rocks and Lancelin, his old home town. With Daniel Giuffre he has created artworks for schools along this coast, from Yanchep to Mindarie, and Windswept extends that long acquaintance with the shoreline.

The screen embodies wind. Each modular panel is tilted at its own angle, and viewed from afar that undulation creates an impression of energy in motion, blowing, surging and rippling across the building. Light, reflection and shadow produce a tonal play across the screen surface, giving it a constantly shifting appearance that never holds still for long.

A secondary layer of pattern is embedded within the perforations of each panel, an idea inspired by witnessing sunlight projected through the undulating ocean surface onto rippled sand below. Two perforation sizes create contrasts in the opacity of the screen, so this subtler layer reveals itself on nearer inspection, and is most apparent from within, where daylight arrives through the screen the way it arrives through the sea.

Windswept continues Vermey and Giuffre's practice of intricate, complex designs integrated within large-scale architectural forms: artworks that function as canopies, modular cladding, louvred shade systems, patterned brickwork and patterned glazed facades. Like the coast it draws from, this one rewards every distance and every hour, a civic statement from the street, an intimate play of light within, and a daily reminder that the same winds and waters that shaped this place still move across it.