Arthur Boyd’s South Coast property opens with new underground museum

There is a certain time in the early morning, before the whipbirds have begun calling, that is particularly sweet on the Shoalhaven.

Mist hangs low over the canopy of spotted gum like Halloween spectres, and kangaroos graze contentedly on open flatlands.

Treechange: Bundanon CEO Rachael Kent at the museum on the Shoalhaven River at Illaroo.Credit: Rhett Wyman

It’s this piece of ancient country – 1000 hectares in all – that the great Australian artist Arthur Boyd and wife Yvonne bequested a nation in 1993, a gesture of unmatched philanthropic generosity.

Decades later the dust covers are to come off on a $34 million transformation of Boyd’s Bundanon on the NSW South Coast.

A new underground contemporary art museum is to open on Saturday to store and display Boyd’s work and those from Bundanon’s $46.5 million collection.

It’s a clever climate-moderated bunker buried into a hillock with fire-resistant glass and airlocks that will keep the collection safe from the type of firestorm that came close to consuming Bundanon in January 2020.

Arthur Boyd in his studio at his Bundanon property in November 1993.Credit: Robert Pearce

“[The museum]’s been designed to be a pocket within a pocket,” says Rachel Kent, the Trust’s newly appointed chief executive. “You’ve got the art museum and then a superstructure around that, one-and-a-half metres wide running all the way around the perimeter, and then you’ve got the hill. So it’s almost a yolk within the albumen within the eggshell.”

Across from the museum is the new Bridge for Creative Learning, a stunning 160-metre, low-slung breezeway structure built across a flood gully, that recalls a wooden trestle bridge.

The Kerstin Thompson-designed bridge contains accommodation for overnight stays, a new cafe, and function and learning spaces ready for an influx of visitors Kent hopes will follow this Saturday’s reopening.

“You have the history and legacy of the Boyd family,” Kent says. “But Bundanon’s new chapter is also very much about the present, it’s about creating a conversation across time, having contemporary artists - and visitors too - respond to the collection and the surrounding landscape. Bushfire resilience and flood mitigation are driving forces in the architectural design of the site.”

Kent has come from the Museum of Contemporary Art where she was its chief curator for most of her 20 years there. She and her teenage son have swapped their inner-city Sydney terrace and the MCA’s killer harbour views for the Shoalhaven tree change.

Hanging the inaugural exhibition in the subterranean Bundanon Art Museum. Credit: Rhett Wyman

“I work with gut instinct, and for me, it felt like the right thing, the right moment,” she says.

Kent is drawn to the idea of developing Bundanon as an arts destination, in the same way, that the Dia Beacon Museum on the banks of New York’s Hudson River, and Japan’s art islands are institutions inseparable from their landscape.

Upstream from the new art museum is Boyd’s historic homestead and original studio where he painted.

Kent says she wants visitors to Boyd’s studio to experience “the sense of the person, the practice, the actual physicality of it”. “You can see his cardigan on the chair,” she says. “There are his tubes or paint and rag bins under the bench. It’s almost as though he has stepped out for a cup of tea.”

The Bridge for Creative Learning, designed by Kerstin Thompson Architects, is across from the museum and is a stunning 160-metre, low-slung breezeway structure built across a flood gully.Credit: Rhett Wyman

Kent studied art history, medieval arts being her favourite subject. “I did photography classes for fun which I enjoyed, and life drawing, but I was never any good at it and never particularly interested vocationally,” she says. “I like to understand how art is done. But actually, my strength is something different. I’m much more interested in the ideas between the space of a museum and the viewing public.”

Kent first visited Bundanon after the 1999 opening of the Glenn Murcutt, Wendy Lewin and Reg Lark designed Arthur and Yvonne Boyd Education Centre which has also been spruced up.

“I remember walking down to the river with friends, looking at the Shoalhaven River, looking at the rocky escarpment, the eucalypts, and seeing immediately what it was that Boyd had painted,” Kent says. “And in that moment understanding something of what this place was, what Arthur had seen in it and how extraordinarily ancient it was.”

The Boyds had returned to Bundanon after spending a decade in London, and Arthur had frequently compared this dramatic landscape of Bundanon to a Wagner opera, with its tumult of seasonal flood and bushfire. It’s true to say it also lit a fire in him.

“People don’t realise how big Bundanon is,” Kent says. “As well as an art museum it’s a wildlife sanctuary, a pristine landscape with all these layers of history through millennia with all these deep First Nations’ connections. It was always part of the deed that it be kept a working farm.”

From across the river comes the lowing of cattle. Bundanon comes with 36 hectares of pasture with its own agistment herd. It’s also home to 20 threatened species, including the glossy black cockatoo, hence, Bundanon’s bush regeneration program.

This new vision for Bundanon was made possible by the former NSW arts minister, Don Harwin, in 2018 when he allocated $10.3 million to the project. The Federal Government followed with $22.5 million for the build, and $3 million to support the national collecting institution over the next two years.

Kent is planning three exhibitions annually. The first From Impulse to Action, features Boyd’s drawings in ink, brightly coloured and monochrome, as the starting point for 12 new commissions by Australian contemporary artists.

The irreplaceable Boyd collection will be stored inside the museum, the racks visible to gallery visitors. It numbers almost 4000 works by Boyd, the Boyd family works and by Boyd’s contemporaries, such as brother-in-law Sidney Nolan.Credit: Rhett Wyman

One of three curtain backdrops created for the Royal Ballet’s performance of Elektra has been reproduced.

“Boyd was living in London,” curator Sophie O’Brien says. “He was collaborating with the Elektra Ballet and Robert Helpmann but also on operas, on tapestries, on lots of different things, and he brought that fresh energy back to Bundanon and Australia.

“When you see him on the river beach in the video, he’s got paint dripping out of his hands. He’s very physical, it’s very visceral. He’s pushing the paint around, but it’s spontaneous, it’s immediate and it’s bodily, and I think that energy is in this suite of drawings.”

Upstream from the new art museum is Boyd’s historic homestead and original studio where he painted.Credit: Rhett Wyman.

The irreplaceable collection will also be stored inside the museum, the racks visible to gallery visitors. It numbers almost 4000 works by Boyd, the Boyd family and Boyd’s contemporaries, such as brother-in-law Sidney Nolan.

Boyd’s famous open-door hospitality and philosophical position that no landscape can be owned by a single person is why Kent believes the artist would have approved of the expansion.

The likes of Nolan, Guy Warren, John Olsen, Peter Kingston and Brett Whiteley visited. Businessman Charles Lloyd Jones once famously arrived in his Rolls Royce by punt from across the Shoalhaven.

Kent joined the MCA in 2000, when the institution was in such a perilous financial state a board director quietly advised Kent to request six months’ salary upfront. She curated Californian artist Doug Aitken’s MCA survey and is keen to see international artists working alongside local peers in Bundanon’s residency program post-COVID-19.

In five or even 10 years time Kent would like to see Bundanon “really widely known, loved, embraced at the local community level, nationally and ultimately internationally”.

“That’s going to take some time of course because you need to build visibility and momentum and we are opening in unusual times,” Kent says. “A lot has changed with COVID-19. But then again it feels strangely like an appropriate time for a place like Bundanon to step forward and shine.”

Bundanon, 170 Riversdale Rd, Illaroo will open to the public from January 29.

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