TasWeekend: It just gets crazier out there in the sphere

An ominous sky, edible insects and strange lights ignite a big day out that begins on Mona’s swanky new ferry.

The new Pharos wing at Mona. Picture: Jesse Hunniford/Mona

WHEN friends from elsewhere roam Tasmania, I want to hear all about their adventures. I may be their local font, but they give me ideas and feedback in return.

Without my friend Sophia raving about Maria Island after visiting as parent helper on a Steiner school excursion from northern NSW, I might still be waiting to discover my cherished retreat.

In early January, Canadian friends rose at 4.30am to catch the sunrise from atop kunanyi/Mt Wellington. It looked breathtaking in their pictures and I will surely do likewise any day now.

Predictably, the couple also raved about Mona. That didn’t make me squirm, though, because I’d just spent a day with a daughter immersed in its strange wonders.

It was a mission of correction. I hadn’t visited the $20 million wing and restaurant that opened a year ago. I had to shake this poor form.

The entrance to Pharos via a James Turrell passageway. Picture: AMANDA DUCKER

It’s a searing 33C when we board the new Mona Roma ferry MR-II from the Brooke Street Pier and take our seats in the Posh Pit up the front, where you’re spoiled rotten with hot and cold drinks and canapes. Smoke is turning the sky bruising shades of purple over the Derwent Valley. I go out to the prow for a better look on what will turn out to be the first of the bad fire days and my skirt blows high in the wind.

As we circle down a spiral staircase into the museum’s subterranean depths, the spectre of the strange sky and my flyaway skirt swirl in my mind. It’s quite the mood-setter.

Our goal is to dive deep into the Mona experience on a sensory journey over unhurried hours, rather than just look at art on the walls.

Surprise landing at Mona: Unseen Seen by James Turrell in the new Pharos wing is quite the experience.

We enter the new Pharos wing through a passageway lit by US illuminato James Turrell. Designed to disconcert, it suspends us in holy light as if we are walking on water then delivers us into a window-lit realm. Sunlit sections of Pharos, the wing aptly named after a famous Ancient Greek lighthouse, are quite unlike the the museum’s dark underground spaces. It’s barely noon, but the Faro dining room is full, a total fire ban having shut down the usual wood-fired pizza stall on the lawns and driven hordes of hungry art lovers down in search of a (considerably pricier) meal.

We’re not ready to eat, though. First we must engage with a UFO that appears to have come to rest. A woman wearing a lab technician coat asks us which version of a crazy light show we’d like to experience inside the mysterious orb – the soft sequence or the hard? I feel as if I’m on the set of a wacky retro sci-fi TV show when she announces: “You are going into the sphere”. We climb a few stairs to enter Turrell’s Unseen Seen.

Seared koji wallaby with pickled walnuts, cherry and Pedro Ximenez, a Spanish sherry, at Mona's Faro. Picture: PATRICK GEE

The “soft” sequence of projected imagery is quite stimulating enough for us as we lie side-by-side in the sealed chamber. It is so visually intense I begin to feel disembodied during the 15-minute session. It’s quite a trip, replete with uneasy soundtrack.

Black Pearl mousse is served in an abalone shell. Picture: AMANDA DUCKER

We follow Unseen Seen with Turrell’s companion piece Weight of Darkness, a self-navigating experience in total darkness. My eyelids feel terribly heavy in this silent chamber and I’m as helpless as a lark at midnight. When I give in to swooning sleepiness and close my eyes, I see the same colour smudges in the blackness as I do when I open them. It’s unsettling, but I don’t want to go home yet.

It’s lunchtime and at Faro that means another conceptual and sensory assault. The fried crickets scattered on the pork jowl are not bad at all – quite dry and nutty. The seared wallaby, tenderised with koji, is great. I’m too whacked out for wine, so we order mocktails. Am I seeing things or is the Illusion blue tea and cucumber concoction turning purple when we add lemon?

We retire to Randy Polumbo’s shimmering Grotto, a silver lounging room and Mona’s self-described selfie capital. Then comes the sombre weight of Richard Wilson’s 20:50, a pool of reflective black sump oil flooding a space we observe from above.

Inside the Grotto by Randy Polumbo. Picture: Jesse Hunniford/Mona

MAKE A NOTE Getting there: Standard ferry tickets from Brooke Street Pier for the 25 ride to Mona, $22. Posh Pit tickets, $55. It takes 20 minutes to drive from central Hobart. Parking onsite is free. The Museum of Old and New Art, 655 Main Rd, Berriedale, is open from 10am daily except Tuesdays. Admission is free for Tasmanian residents. Extra charges: The Unseen Seen and Weight of Darkness experience costs $25. Moorilla wine-tasting is $10 for 8-10 samples, redeemable on bottle purchase. Bookings recommended for ferry and additional experiences at mona.net.au

As much as I am transfixed by Yves Klein’s epic floorwork Pigment bleu sec (Dry blue pigment) in the Zero exhibition on post-war experimental art, I am more intrigued when, standing before a recreation of Henk Peeter’s 1966 installation of water-filled plastic bags, a fellow viewer tells me that as a child she won a goldfish in just such a bag and Gordon, as she named her captive, lived on for 11 years.

Today’s session of Mona’s 42 Day Music Marathon, a new offering for Hobart after Mona moved summer festival Mofo up to Launceston this year, is getting under way in the gallery writhing with Sidney Nolan’s multi-panelled Snake.

I’m ready for that drink now. A simple glass of wine will not do on this day of sensory indulgence. So a sip of nine drops it is – from the site’s long-established Moorilla winery. By now it seems normal that John Olsen’s painting The Source is displayed on the ceiling.

The author was a guest of Mona