ARE YOU SPLENDID?
What happens when you pour 600 gallons of beer, a few gumboots, some splashes of face paint, a dozen or so low-slung black jeans and a finishing drizzle of music so indie-cool it’d hurt your eyes if you weren’t already wearing Wayfarers? You get Splendour in the Grass, the annual music festival held in the marshlands outside of Byron Bay. What happens when you pop some fresh young artists into an “immersive lab-styled think tank” and press ‘play’? You get Splendid, the arts and ideas off-shoot of the musical main-stage, co-run by the Lismore Regional Gallery and the Australia Council for the Arts. Past participants have included Alice Lang (whose knitted sock igloo currently sits in Firstdraft Gallery), and from Sydney Mish Grigor of performance art group post, sculptural artist with a penchant for drums Lauren Brincat, hybrid artist Daniel Tanner and Shakthi Sivanathan of the community media innovator CuriousWorks. Sivanathan says of the experience, “The best thing about Splendid was meeting the other artists. They were an amazing bunch and we’re all still friends.” While Sivanathan did not come up with anything, “super-relevant” for the festival during the three-week intensive retreat, he did conceptualise a major project which he is now undertaking through his own initiative, CuriousWorks. He attributes this to, “We spent more time going through workshops led by guest artists than getting to work with and understand each other [as artists] on a professional level. I would have preferred that.” This year the festival is picking up its pegs and moving to the Woodford Folk Festival site in Queensland, which means room for more Splendour-lovers, as well as hopefully more ambitious arts projects. Still sound rather splendid? You only have a few days to get your application in – gates are closed Tuesday 6th April, head to www.splendid.org.au to for the full line-up.
