No dead end art for graveyard Sydney Biennale

An historic Australian graveyard which includes the final resting place of a one-time harpist to Napoleon and prominent figures from the nation's colonial era has become the site of an art installation with an enduring message.

Swedish artist Bo Christian Larsson had never visited Sydney, let alone seen Camperdown Cemetery, when he agreed to work among its weathered graves as part of the city's 20th Biennale, Australia's largest contemporary visual arts festival.

Dog-walkers and visitors make their way through the tree-filled space where some of the graves have been fitted in white cloths for his work "Fade Away, Fade Away, Fade Away".

The covers are designed to strip away the hierarchy of social class that dictated life when the cemetery -- which dates from 1848 and was considered full within decades -- was founded.

"What I am interested in is actually to get rid of the history on each stone because I have seen the record of this cemetery -- the more money you had, the better stone you could get of course, and the more important place and bigger grave and so on," Larsson says.
"It is about the stones itself as a sort of blank page and that you don't know who is buried underneath."

Creating the cloth covers are a group of seamstresses, Sydney artists recruited for the installation, who choose the stones they want to cover and then tailor a piece for each one.

The work must respect the historic nature of the cemetery, meaning some graves are off limits, and the artists are careful not to hasten the deterioration of the memorials, some of which are crumbling or broken.

"They are bringing a lot to the work as well," Larsson says. As part of the installation, he has the women work out of a shipping container -- a nod to globalisation and the often invisible labour of women in garment making.

Larsson, whose often dark works can incorporate drawing, sculpture and performance and reflects his interest in symbols, rituals and social conventions, says the installation is on the theme of fading away, because even in life "you are slowly fading away".

"You get buried and you are slowly fading away. The stones are actually fading away. Although as a human you think that stone will last forever but it doesn't obviously," he explains.

- 'Kind of scary' -

Larsson says Camperdown Cemetery -- which closed in 1942 -- was the right place for the installation given his interest "in the mysterious and the life after death".
Among the thousands buried there lie Nicolas-Charles Bochsa, who was forced to leave France where he had once been Napoleon's harpist after being accused of forgery, and explorer and New South Wales Surveyor-General Sir Thomas Mitchell.

Bathsheba Ghost, a convict who went on to become matron of the Sydney Infirmary, has a memorial in the grounds as does Eliza Donnithorne, a recluse and eccentric who was jilted at the altar in 1856 and is claimed by some in Australia as the inspiration for Charles Dickens' character Miss Havisham.

Sydney artist Katy Plummer, one of the women working on the installation, said the exhibition has forced her to think about the people who were buried here.

"There is a family over there where a 29-year-old woman died and then 21 days later her infant son died and it's just the saddest thing. There's his little name, aged 21 days," she says.

"I also think about the individuals whose names you can't read any more, that's really interesting," she adds.

Larsson says wandering the cemetery in the grounds of St Stephen's Anglican Church in a busy pocket of Sydney's inner-west Newtown suburb at night can be "kind of scary actually".

He says: "It becomes very much like a playground for the dead people somehow.

"I like it a lot. Because the stones in the twilight when the sun goes down, the covers become really bright, a little bit like ghosts."

The Sydney Biennale runs  until early June.
Source: AFP