Heliotope is honoured to have been selected as a finalist for the 2023 Tapestry Design Prize for Architects, a design competition run by the Australian Tapestry Workshop on a bi-annual basis. For our entry into the 2023 Tapestry Design Prize for Architects, Heliotope partnered with emerging artist Alison van den Berg, from lutruwita | Tasmania where she practices from lunawani | Bruny Island. Her art practice is immersed in the ever-changing landscapes that surround her; examining natural environments from contemporary viewpoints.
                We acknowledge the thousands of years of weaving practice and tradition that has occurred on the site, the traditional Country of the Dharawal and Dhurga language groups and continues to this day.
                Arthur Boyd’s own floor to ceiling Reception Hall Tapestry at Parliament House in Canberra acts to dissolve the architectural construct of this highly formal ceremonial space and transport occupants beyond the confines of the building to immerse them deep into this place, south eastern Australia.
                Our aim, in developing a tapestry to hang in the recently completed Bundanon Art Museum by Kerstin Thompson Architects was to employ a similar device, rendering the existing wall of the underground gallery as a portal to deep time, plotted as it is layer upon layer in the same iconic Nowra Sandstone strata that stretches from Bundanon to the Blue Mountains and characterises so much of the contemporary city of Sydney; entwined with the many generations of First Peoples who inhabited and sang with this stone for millennia. The geological strata reveal primordial upheavals, shifting shorelines, and evolving ecologies. It makes visible the incomprehensible depth of these relationships, with ancient species of vegetation both found fossilized in the stone and living strong within Shoalhaven bioregions today.
                The primary detail of the tapestry occurs at eye level – an anthropocentric perspective – and becomes fainter and more unfocussed as the layering moves higher and further away from the viewer, lost to the Western eye. A sample of our design has been created by master weaver Chris Cochius, and exhibited in the 2024 group show Propositions, 2023 Tapestry Design Prize for Architects, at the Australian Tapestry Workshop gallery; and again in 2025 in the group show House Show, at the Robin Boyd Foundation, Walsh Street.