Hughs Alley

Musical Artist

Big Yawn

Melbourne quartet Big Yawn make experimental electronic music by fusing a wash of sweeping synthesizers, heavily refracted vocal sampling, motorik style percussion and disorientating dub FX.

Visual Artist

Sarah crowEST, AKA BLOTCHWOMAN, is a Melbourne-based visual artist working across the boundaries of contemporary art, design, and craft to create word events and performances that are embedded with music, politics, and humour.

Before & After

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Edge Piece (Edge Closer)

Edge Piece traverses the two Chinatown sites of Hughs Alley (Edge Closer) and Corrs Lane (Close to the Edge). The initial inspiration came from the architecture as seen from the backs, edges or laneways of the city.

The lines and boxes of the diagram and 3D letters in Hughs Alley offer a poetic riff on the forms and sounds to be found right there. These peripheral spaces bear traces of the past and the particularities of the walls, with their pre-existing features, became a guide or score for further marks.

The glimpse of a high, vertical wall provided a visual slice of a much larger structure presenting a crisp edge as an elongated painting surface. The text on the margin of the narrow wall in Corrs Lane references The Message of Grandmaster Flash. The adjacent, blue, face of ‘Leo’, directly responds to the 3D relief that forms the panelled wall. The face was already present and the painting brings those shapes into focus.

Music