Looking out and across, up and down, the river sometimes becomes a cloud, 2021 by Louisa Bufardeci is SAM’s inaugural Art Wall commission presented on the Furphy Family Wall. The large-scale artwork is the first in an ongoing series of dynamic temporary commissions by contemporary artists, designed to respond to and enliven a dedicated space on the museum’s top floor, looking out over Victoria Park Lake.  

Bufardeci is a multidisciplinary artist who uses digital images, needlepoint and drawing to create abstract compositions that play on conventional visual coding systems, such as maps and charts. Overlaying political and geographic data with social imaginaries, she offers new ways to see and understand our world. Looking out and across, up and down, the river sometimes becomes a cloud is a propositional map for a future Shepparton. In it, plans of arterial roads and local river ways are overlaid with equally abstract visuals, including the shape of a set of clouds the artist observed on a visit to the city one afternoon in November 2020, and  the outline of the view that can be seen opposite the Art Wall. The convergence of these wildly different types of visual data creates whimsical connections and new possibilities for envisaging Shepparton and its future.

Artist Bio

Louisa Bufardeci is an artist, researcher and educator based in Naarm (Melbourne). For over twenty years she has contributed to the local community by producing and exhibiting artwork, teaching at various art institutions, volunteering as a guide to contemporary art at her local community centre and by mentoring other artists. Her art practice draws on and questions forms of representation such as mapping, data and statistics when they are used as tools of looking and knowing to represent human experience.   

Bufardeci has participated in international exhibitions including the NGV Triennial, the Asia-Pacific Triennial, and the Asian Art Biennial, and her work has been included in numerous solo and group exhibitions in Naarm (Melbourne) and other cities in Australia and overseas. Her work is held in the collections of a number of Australian galleries, universities and corporations including Artbank, Sydney; Monash University Museum of Art, Melbourne; National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne; The University of Melbourne School of Anthropology, Geography & Environmental Sciences, Melbourne; UBS Australia, Sydney; Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Richmond, United States. 

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Location: Furphy Family Art Wall, Level 4

Free