Cork Mural - Denmark Civic Centre
6 June 1995
Poor acoustics in the Denmark Civic Centre caused mainly by the brick wall at the back of the hall, prompted the idea of creating the cork mural. It was intended to use the cork to absorb sound and at the same time use recycled materials to create a unique mural.
The effect of thousands of corks making up a picture created an effect similar to Aboriginal dot paintings. Funding from the Australia Council allowed us to contract two Aboriginal artists, Tanya Morgan and Michael Watt, to work with six local artists to design and create the mural.
The project started on 6 June 1995 when we went in search of wine corks. We estimated that we would need 30,000. We couldn't drink that much wine, so we approached, wineries, restaurants and finally cork manufacturers. After finding 30,000 we found that we had underestimated the number and that we would need 60,000 We finally found the place where all the used corks go - to the Girl Guides Association and fortunately got the rest from them.
We set up a production line to hand paint all the corks in selected colours. More and more volunteers arrived, school classes came to help, people popped in...
Then came the best part. After drawing the design and underpainting the boards we began to glue the corks - a bit like paint by numbers.
It took three weeks to glue all the corks on the panels. The big day arrived and on 7 August we mounted the mural on the wall. The scaffolding collapsed, no one got injured, but we got it up all in one piece.
It was unveiled on 11 August 1995.
Since then we have had to replace corks that have been broken off by busy fingers. The design of the mural is strong enough not to be flawed by the replaced corks being the wrong colour. This is a minor problem. We found out that this is one of the differences between public art and community art. Public Art is an investment and must be indestructible, while Community Art is more concerned with the process and the result is really a bonus. We are very proud of our bonus and the acoustics have improved.