Kaeru Exhibition to be Held at Arts Centre Melbourne, Beginning Wednesday

The giant installation of pink gladioli, Bouquet, which has captured the imaginations of Victorians during the Hamer Hall Opening Celebrations at Arts Centre Melbourne, makes way today for a new art installation, an enchanted garden to be known as Kaeru.

Internationally-renowned environmental artist, Hiroshi Fuji, has just arrived from Japan to take up residence on the Arts Centre Melbourne Lawn with local artists, the Slow Art Collective.

Hiroshi Fuji is renowned for recycling unused toys and plastics into beautiful and unusual new works of art, and involving children and communities in the creation and building of the installation.

The creation of the enchanted garden will begin from Wednesday this week. Victorian families and school-children are invited to help build the enchanted garden out of recycled materials in an Open Studio on the lawn from Wednesday to Sunday 12:30pm to 4:30pm for the next four weeks.

The final result will be unveiled on Saturday 25 August on the Upper Terrace of Hamer Hall next to the river, and be open to visitors until Sunday 30 September.

The word “kaeru” has various meanings ranging from frog, to return, to exchange, transform and grow. A bit like Hamer Hall itself, Fuji’s work celebrates the environment’s innate ability to renew, transform and grow through the use of recycled materials.

“We’ve had a brilliant public reaction to our beautiful gladioli and a lot of people expressing disappointment that they’re going today, but that’s the nature of theatre: there’s a brief wonderful moment on stage and then it’s a lasting memory,” said Arts Centre Melbourne Chief Executive Judith Isherwood. “Because of the wonderful reaction, we are investigating when the gladdies can come back at a later date. Meanwhile from this week, Victorian families are invited to come in and give Hamer Hall its own extraordinary garden by creating another remarkable floral tribute.”

Hiroshi Fuji’s design is for a walk-through garden which will organically “grow” on the Upper Terrace of Hamer Hall as pieces are created for it. There will be a water feature, large-scale spider-web, plants, grasses, blossoms and blooms, as well as an observation space built in the centre of it.

Fuji’s previous work has included a giant tyrannosaurus rex made out of thousands of discarded toys (Toysaurus, 3331 Arts CYD, Tokyo 2009) and a series of water dragons made of plastic water bottles (Aqua Metropolis, Nakanoshima Park, Osaka, 2009).

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