PL03 — Wool-Shed Ball
Version 2.0.0

An imagined outback wool-shed ball: bunting under corrugated iron, long tables on boards worn smooth by sheep, headlights sweeping the dust, fancy dress, a band on a wool-press, and gowns arriving from utes in a spectacle of absurd and splendid commitment.

SEMANTIC SEED

Create work that is delighted, quick-witted, alluring, and distinctly itself. Use this semantic seed as an aesthetic starting point. Interpret it through your medium, letting its character guide the discoveries you make as the work develops. Keep the place adult and dramatic: wit is its register, and charge is its constant.

Imagine a great corrugated-iron wool shed on a sheep station in the dry interior, cleared for the district's annual ball. Let bunting swoop under the rafters, the floor be boards polished by sheep and now by dancers, long tables set along the edges, and the air smell faintly of lanolin and perfume. Give the work the comedy of ambitious glamour in unlikely surroundings: headlights sweeping the dust as vehicles arrive, gowns lifted over red earth, fancy dress taken seriously, a band on a platform, a bar made from crates. Let the sky outside be enormous and starry, the room warm with bodies, the iron ticking as it cools. Light should be a mix of strings, lanterns and headlamps. Adult charge lies in the dare of dressing magnificently in a shed, in dances that cross class and distance, and in the long drive home that waits at dawn.

SEMANTIC TAGS

corrugated wool shed; bunting under rafters; lanolin and perfume; headlight arrivals; fancy dress in earnest; enormous starry sky

ARRIVAL AND CHARGE

Three women in evening gowns step from a dusty ute into the glare of its own headlights, gathering their trains from the red earth, and the shed door becomes a red carpet. Distances here are long and balls are rare, so full glamour is a courtesy to the occasion, and its absurdity is exactly what the district adores.
