On Site

I remember as a child jumping up and hanging on to the rectangular holes cut in the hoardings of construction sites. I’d look through into the cavern of activity until my fingers ached.

Three years ago the City of Melbourne commissioned me to paint, draw and write about the construction of their new ten-storey headquarters, Council House 2, on the site of a car park in Little Collins Street. CH2, as it was called, was to be the ‘greenest’ office building in Australia. It was radically designed and engineered, would cool and heat itself without conventional air-conditioning, recycle its own water and even ‘mine’ water from Melbourne’s sewerage system. It would use recycled aggregate and timber. To circulate air, the ceilings would curve in elegant waves. Water would drop through cooling towers into basement tanks containing thousands of stainless steel balls filled with special salts. Giant vents on the roof would spin in the breeze and draw air through the building and put electricity back into the grid.

I’m not a studio painter and do nearly all my portraits and landscapes from life. I use oils or watercolours for paintings, charcoal or pencil for drawings. I work small, with all my gear in a couple of backpacks, and don’t use an easel.

My task at CH2, as I foresaw it, was not to replicate or compete with photography, but to come up with something spontaneous, images that acted as reportage but also had an abstract life of their own. I wanted to capture things that would soon disappear or be covered over, to depict the ‘unmade bed’.

The building wasn’t going to wait for me, so I quickly did the ‘Red Card’ OH&S course and the Union Safety Induction. I was lent a hard hat and flouro vest and Security gave me a swipe card with ‘Tom Carment – Contractor’ written on it, which impressed my kids. I had my own plastic-wrapped Hansen Juncken coffee mug.

My first pictures were done from inside the excavation, below street level, sitting amongst the muddy rubble, oils, brushes and turps on the ground around me. I’d never before painted anything that changed so quickly – it was like painting a landscape in flux, where not only did the shadows lengthen and the sun go in and out of the clouds, but the very trees and hills changed shape and disappeared before your eyes.

CH2 is hugged on three sides by other buildings, so after the excavation was finished, the surrounding rooftops became my preferred painting venues. I gave myself a sore back leaning over the parapet walls, looking down at the site. If it became windy I had to pack up, in case my laden palette or a few brushes blew off the wall and hit something or someone down below.

I soon found that when the men went off to lunch or smoko the site seemed incomplete – a stage set without actors. I would stop then, returning when they did. And at lunchtime, the smell of food drifting up from restaurants enticed me back down to street level.

I tried to alternate distant views with closer drawings of workers doing particular tasks. After the static drilling of the excavation was over, the work became more mobile and there were days when I struggled amidst the activity. I craved anonymity and tried to be discreet, but it was hard. When I crossed the reinforcing mesh with just a light pack on my back, I stumbled like a drunkard, waving my arms. The formworkers could carry a full sheet of form ply across it with ease and grace. One day when I returned to the Site Office and slung my helmet on its hook, Greg, the laconic manager, asked me how I’d gone. ‘Oh, not so good today,’ I said. ‘They’re moving quicker than the last time I was here.’ ‘They’d want to be moving or we’d go broke,’ he replied.

As the structure rose to full height I painted from Little Collins Street in watercolours with my paint plates balanced on an electricity box. On other days I drew in pencil, at the corner of Swanston and Bourke Streets. Like a branch sticking out into a creek, I kept snagging curious passers by – elderly visitors to town, junkies begging money and once, a security guard from the City of Melbourne who’d been told I was acting suspiciously.

CH2 is complete now and fully occupied, with a selection of my pictures framed and scattered through its interior. People come from around the world to inspect the building. I’ve been told that it survived the heat of summer well. I think back on my experience at CH2 often. I’ve been wondering how old construction workers feel when they pass by the buildings they’ve worked on. I wonder what they remember, what they think about, and whether there’s a residue of memory – pride, companionship, drudgery – in each one.

Index of pictures

Reo laying #1, 2004, oil on panel, 144 x 187mm

Reo laying #2, 2004, oil on panel, 144 x187mm

Excavation from CH1 roof, 2004, oil on linen, 510 x 407mm

Formworker with plank, 2004, charcoal on paper, 203 x 306mm

Dogmen and Town Hall, 2004, charcoal on paper, 203 x 306mm

Workers on level 8, 2005, oil on linen, 190 x 304mm

Ceiling panels, level 4, 2005, oil on linen, 510 x 407mm

Town Hall and ceiling panel, 2005, oil on panel, 174 x 110mm

Charcoal drawings of workers, 2004–6

Interior with electricians, 2005, oil on linen, 230 x 323mm

Steelwork west façade, 2005, pencil on paper, 355 x 272mm

South façade exposed (looking west), 2005, watercolour on arches paper, 104 x 156mm

South façade exposed (looking west), 2005, watercolour on arches paper, 252 x 324mm

Turbines east to west, 2006, pencil on paper, 4 sheets, 210 x 154mm

CH2 from Flinders Street, 2005, oil on panel, 120 x 175mm

The artist gratefully acknowledges the support of the City of Melbourne in lending transparencies for use in some of these reproductions.