Fugal alternatives: Reverberations of Studio 01 Launched

The students of the Master of Architecture design studio at the Melbourne School of Design have staged presentations that interpret themes from Percy Grainger’s work and biography in their pop-up exhibition here at the Grainger Museum.

The bold and wide ranging material responses incorporate vocabularies of exhibition design, architecture, technology and fine art to expand on the students’ findings both in the Grainger Archive and here at the Museum itself.

A commonality among the responses is the way in which forms of interactivity are highlighted as a strategy in exhibition design. The use of such strategies serves to augment audience engagement with certain themes or historical narratives, demonstrating an acute sense of the way in which an audience views and spatially encounter museum displays. This includes such works as a rotating maquette of Grainger’s Butterfly piano operated by hand crank, made by Zi Han Wong; and a layered plexi-glass light box displaying a fragment of Grainger’s letters operated by switches, conceived by Natalie Keynton.

From their investigative research, students have portrayed themes as wide ranging as Grainger’s use of graphic scores to his dramatic and well documented relationship with his mother Rose. In doing so, students have re-presented objects and primary documents from the archive within these displays. This effort to propose new lenses of interpretation to the biography of Grainger is what informs part of the mission of the museum today.

The travelling life - Percy Grainger, Haotin Zeng

Broken Notes, Tony Jia

The Butterfly Piano, Zi Han Wong

The Three of Us, Mitchell Small

The exhibition was developed this semester as a collaboration between the Grainger Museum and the Master of Architecture design studio at the Melbourne School of Design taught by Stephanie Liddicoat. The exhibition runs until 24 September, 2017.