Golden grove

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RESEARCH BACKGROUND: 'Golden Grove' was a educative landscape design, public art and interpretative program conceived, designed, documented and constructed as part of 'Fertile Ground', a two-stage redevelopment of Syndey Univesity's Darlington Campus. In collaboration with landscape archiects Taylor, Cullity, Lethlean and Dyskors, Paul Carter worked on the project as a public artist (from 2007-2009). RESEARCH CONTRIBUTION: For 'Golden Grove' Carter designed a network of helical ground markings identifying nodal points, a suite of tempered steel vertical blades inscribed with a specially-composed text in a new font, a lighting design installed underfoot on the Shepherd Street entrance boardwalk and a 30-metre semi-circular ground inscription. The work used a mythopoetic technique of collective memory recovered that was centred on the radiating assocations of 'Golden Grove', a name that is a palimpsest of different activity associated with the Darlington Campus. RESEARCH SIGNIFICANCE: In 2010, TCL won the Australian Institute of Landscape Architects National Landscape Architecture Award of Excellence for Darlington Public Domain - Stage 2 project (known as 'Fertile Ground'). In its 'concept statement' for the award, TCL acknowledged the centrality of Carter's 'Golden Grove' design strategy to the project. Carter's work acknowledged the site as a place of education but also repose and movement. "Based on extensive research into the many-layered human and natural associations of the site, Golden Grove articulates the mythic identity of the site, providing a template for future invention and encouraging the consolidation of collective identity" the statement said. IN 2007, the first stage of the Darlington Campus redevelopment project won a Merit Award for Design in Landscape Architecture in the Australian Institute of Landscape Architects (Victoria) awards.