Earlier this year, Maree Clarke visited cavernous spaces deep beneath Melbourne. In fluoro vest and hard-hat, Clarke contemplated an underground site below St Kilda Road, near the Shrine. She saw this upside-down world with new eyes, and sized up a huge tunnelling machine, responsible for extracting vast quantities of soil and rock.
There are expected to be about half-a-million more passengers flowing through these stations each week when the tunnels open in 2025. That’s a big audience, even for the experienced Clarke, who is well-known for big public artworks. There’s a lot of historical weight behind her, too – not only the deep-time of Indigenous connections with Country, but the more recent phenomenon of underground railway art.Westfriedhof underground station in Munich.
The use of lenticular prints – a lens-based technology in which printed images have an illusion of 3D depth – has been at the heart of Clarke’s proposal and she has been working on the possibilities ever since. “In my head, and I can see it, you become miniscule in the space,” she says. “How I pull it off is yet to be seen. That is the challenge.
Jefa Greenaway, director of Greenshoot Consulting, which is managing the traditional owner engagement for the Metro Tunnel cultural program, finds the idea of being able to embed cultural stories compelling. “What better way to affirm a connection to layers of history and memory of place than to acknowledge and celebrate Indigenous culture manifested through the built environment,” he says.
The Metro Tunnel Project has also been busy commissioning many temporary artworks around the five new station sites, as well as at the eastern and western tunnel entrances. These aim at maintaining public engagement, but also to signal that art and culture are an important part of the project. One Creative Program artist now showing his work is Stephen Banham, a designer, typographer and RMIT lecturer. Banham says one of his most interesting and memorable underground rail experiences was seeing graphics on tunnel walls while speeding through the abandoned “ghost stations” of East Berlin before the 1989 reunification of the city. “The interiors had been frozen in time,” he says., at the State Library Station, is anything but ghostly – but it does play a trick with the eye and mind.