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Star Sovereign Resort, Sydney

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For this project, we harnessed both the historical layering of the site and the aspirations of the Client to create a forward-thinking collection that represents both Australian and Chinese artists as well as subject-matter from two regions of the world that are connected through commerce. The site links the natural and engineered world, and, through her collection, we sought to depict manmade artifice and its hand in nature through three constituents:- power, water and light. Power, interpreted through auspiciousness in subtle references to luck, especially hailing from Chinese custom, to celestial bodies, and reverence of nature; water, and movement more broadly, through journey, especially seafaring, and dance; and light in terms of the history of the site re-interpreted through light technology and naturally occurring light sources. 

The interior design of this development makes a powerful statement about the rationality in design that defined Modernism:- embodied in a key dining area from the materiality of the wall finish in corrugated high-gloss dark silver senlong offset by dramatic down- and up-lighting, to the highly structured centrepiece of turbine-inspired lighting pendants. Moreover, the ID blurs the distinction between function and form by exploring the aesthetic possibilities of industry with a de nite nod Marc Alexander Ullrichto the site’s past and the machinery that powered it. 

Integrating art into the interior design of a project with such highly structured spaces, we built a collection that centrally explored the magic of landscapes, from the visitor’s very doorstep up to far-flung skies.

In terms of materiality, we have captured aspects of power, water and light and the site in everything from back-lit silkscreen prints to stone-paste paintings, and from marble to gold- leaved malachite. In the above-mentioned dining area for instance, a collage of facing polyptychs depict celestial bodies of stars, the sun, and the moon reflected in water. The finer detail of the background of the works are particles of solar substance moving through the Earth’s atmosphere and are dotted with, for instance, comets in movement. This series also features one of the great natural light displays in the Earth’s sky, the Aurora Australis or Southern Lights. This natural electrical phenomenon is characterised by the appearance of streams of red or greenish light in the sky, which we underscored. For instance, in a nearby polyptych rendered in 2- and 3-D the eclipse physically leaps o the support in a circle of neon to present the interplay of nature and the hand of intervention.

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