Sweet Home Wallumbilla
         Prickly Pear

THE PROJECT A collaboration between a chairmaker, composer, and documenter; discovering history, connection and community 2019 Dr Mike Epworth, lead creative, made four chairs created for the Prickly Pear project, fashioned from the fallen floors, walls and broken furniture salvaged from an abandoned house on the outskirts of Wallumbilla, Queensland. Each chair corresponds to a specific area of the house, the blue seat, a fallen wall from the hallway; the green seat, a packing case from the kitchen; the weathered seat, the floor from the front verandah: and the baltic pine seat, a storage box from the main bedroom. The legs, backrungs, and headrests are carved from various bed frames scattered in the rooms. The red-pine headrests of the green and weathered seats bear the scolloped shapes formed from children jumping up and down on their beds, the back of the weathered seat, a hole where the pipe carried the house’s water in. The collaboration with Dr Duncan Gardiner composor and musician with the Enoggera Ensemble, explores the physical and meta-physical relationships of a stringed-instrument musician and the chair. The playing pose of a classically trained musician inherently requires something to sit on, and this prerequisite created ‘of’ the space, which inspired the composer. The musicians sit within the chairs' structure physically connecting them to the activities and history, inspiring the music they are playing. The connection to the chairs and appreciation is dynamic and contingent, changing as new understandings of the abandoned house emerge from stories we discovered about the people who lived or visited there. This project was memorialised through images, video recording via documentation and community liaison Bronwyn Harm, culminating in a performance piece both at the abandoned house and the Wallumbilla Memorial Arts Hall, supported by Arts Queensland