‘Treatment: Six public artworks at the Western Treatment Plant’ curator and artist conversation

Photo by David Cross

Treatment was a two-day, site-responsive public art project on display (via eighty-minute bus tour) at Melbourne Water’s Western Treatment Plant in Werribee on 14 and 21 November 2015. Curators David Cross and Cameron Bishop invited six artists to work with the plant’s sights and sounds—its treatment lagoons and abandoned former township, its world-renowned wetlands and resident waterfowl—in order to explore its history, landscape and technology.

Join us at MPavilion as David and Cameron lead Treatment’s six featured artists—Catherine Bell, Bindi Cole Chocka, Megan Evans, Shane McGrath, Techa Noble and Spiros Panigirakis—in a round-table conversation that will look back at the project and specifically consider how each artist chose to respond to the 11,000-hectare site. The six works (from performance to sound and film installation) will ground a broader discussion about how we curate and make temporary public art that responds to highly particular cultural, environmental and technological conditions. What benefits arise from artworks popping up in the street, the park, the paddock? Can public art engage a community’s collective mind and change the way it is perceived?