Art Treatment 111

The Spotswood Pumping Station (Scienceworks) was the venue for the launch of Treatment 111, an exhibition of temporary public artwork celebrating ‘the unique features, communities, technologies and ecologies of Melbourne’s waste water’. The artworks will be featured across Scienceworks, Brooklyn and Werribee. 

The Pumping Station built in the 1890s and the heart of the Melbourne Sewerage Scheme, is an example of 19th century ingenuity, ambition and reflects the grand tradition of the nineteenth century industrial buildings that celebrated the use of new technologies.

As a venue for public artworks it challenges both curator and artist with its backdrop of pumping houses, boilers, coal bunkers and towers. Artist, Robert Andrew’s ‘A perpetrual reveal’, Linda Tegg’s, ‘Tending a line in the year of the rabbit’ (a work in a vacant block of land across the road), and Zany Begg’s, ‘Prisoners’ (a looped video installation) were presented with a challenging task against the Late French Empire styled buildings!