ANCHOR : Heidi Axelsen and Hugo Moline
This year’s New Annual festival invites visitors to see the city’s familiar corners transformed by bold, immersive art — including a trio of shipping containers repurposed as micro-worlds. In a city like Newcastle where the shipping container is a ubiquitous and utilitarian object carrying cargo in and out of the city daily, it is the perfect canvas to hand over to artists to reimagine. Created specifically for New Annual these containers host sensory and optical experiences that reorient how audiences engage with place, time and memory.
On the walk to Nobby Headland/Whibayganba you’ll find a shipping container turned inhabitable camera obscura by Heidi Axelsen and Hugo Moline (MAPA) using nothing but old fashioned analogue lens. Light filters through a tiny aperture to cast an upside-down, moving projection of the headland, lighthouse and passersbys onto the inner walls lined with a salvaged parachute and sand filled tubes. Visitors are ushered in for a four minute experience to sit and be immersed in soundscape Axelsen cobbled together from field recordings of coal loaders, passing ships, her local Tighes Hill community choir and her breath. The pair drawing upon their background in architecture and sculpture have created both a disorienting and meditative device: an invitation to be still, dark, yet deeply connected to place or as the name suggests anchored. In a time of relentless inversions, upended certainties, unpredictability, here is a small space and time for stillness to be here but not be, to be an observer. Children are given drawings of sounds to listen out for and visitors emerge from the space seeing a familiar place in a new light.
About Heidi Axelsen and Hugo Moline
Heidi Axelsen and Hugo Moline are a collaborative creative duo working between the discursive criticality of arts practice and the applied, spatial and urban scales of architecture and design. Axelsen and Moline’s work is deeply site- specific. Typically generated through long- term collaborations with particular places, they contemplate the complex, often overlapping communities who dwell and pass through them, and experiment with forms of speculative fabulation, grounded in community-based research and social processes. Their work critically examines the current ways in which the world is arranged, and why the things our lives depend on the most - such as plant life, or care work - are so undervalued. As a response to these questions, they make work which speculates other ways of organising ourselves or relating to others; building fragments of these other worlds, and the tools, furniture, shelters and systems which may enable these alternate relations to flourish. Significant exhibitions and commissions include: Field Rooms (2025) City of Sydney, Memory Vessel a permanent public artwork at Westmead Hospital (2020), Plant Nation (2021) commissioned by UAP, The Visitors (2019) MAMA Gallery, Owner Occupy, (2015) Sherman Contemporary Art Foundation & 2000 Waraji 200 Feet (2015), Echigo Tsumari Art Triennial.
ANCHOR is located at Camp Shortland - Closest to Nobbys Beach, at the start of the walkway to Nobby's Headland
Visit Anchor and other immersive public artworks as part of New Annual's self-guided public art trail. Learn more.
DURATION
4 minutes, Drop-in
SENSORY & CONTENT WARNING
Dark space and sound scape
ACCESSIBILITY
Accessibility information will be confirmed closer to event date.
Proudly supported by Create NSW.
On the walk to Nobby Headland/Whibayganba you’ll find a shipping container turned inhabitable camera obscura by Heidi Axelsen and Hugo Moline (MAPA) using nothing but old fashioned analogue lens. Light filters through a tiny aperture to cast an upside-down, moving projection of the headland, lighthouse and passersbys onto the inner walls lined with a salvaged parachute and sand filled tubes. Visitors are ushered in for a four minute experience to sit and be immersed in soundscape Axelsen cobbled together from field recordings of coal loaders, passing ships, her local Tighes Hill community choir and her breath. The pair drawing upon their background in architecture and sculpture have created both a disorienting and meditative device: an invitation to be still, dark, yet deeply connected to place or as the name suggests anchored. In a time of relentless inversions, upended certainties, unpredictability, here is a small space and time for stillness to be here but not be, to be an observer. Children are given drawings of sounds to listen out for and visitors emerge from the space seeing a familiar place in a new light.
About Heidi Axelsen and Hugo Moline
Heidi Axelsen and Hugo Moline are a collaborative creative duo working between the discursive criticality of arts practice and the applied, spatial and urban scales of architecture and design. Axelsen and Moline’s work is deeply site- specific. Typically generated through long- term collaborations with particular places, they contemplate the complex, often overlapping communities who dwell and pass through them, and experiment with forms of speculative fabulation, grounded in community-based research and social processes. Their work critically examines the current ways in which the world is arranged, and why the things our lives depend on the most - such as plant life, or care work - are so undervalued. As a response to these questions, they make work which speculates other ways of organising ourselves or relating to others; building fragments of these other worlds, and the tools, furniture, shelters and systems which may enable these alternate relations to flourish. Significant exhibitions and commissions include: Field Rooms (2025) City of Sydney, Memory Vessel a permanent public artwork at Westmead Hospital (2020), Plant Nation (2021) commissioned by UAP, The Visitors (2019) MAMA Gallery, Owner Occupy, (2015) Sherman Contemporary Art Foundation & 2000 Waraji 200 Feet (2015), Echigo Tsumari Art Triennial.
ANCHOR is located at Camp Shortland - Closest to Nobbys Beach, at the start of the walkway to Nobby's Headland
Visit Anchor and other immersive public artworks as part of New Annual's self-guided public art trail. Learn more.
DURATION
4 minutes, Drop-in
SENSORY & CONTENT WARNING
Dark space and sound scape
ACCESSIBILITY
Accessibility information will be confirmed closer to event date.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Proudly supported by Create NSW.
