Catherine Woo - REFLECTIONS – PAST AND PRESENT, Merinda Park Train Station, Cranbourne North

T Projects commissioned artist Catherine Woo for this locally inspired artwork at Melbourne’s Merinda Park railway station.

The new station building has highly visible canopies over its platforms and forecourt, and the luminescent artwork Reflections – Past and Present adorns the ceilings on both sides of the station.

The station is built on the site of a pre-Colonial marshland, and Catherine’s work references the marshland as well as the nearby Cranbourne wetlands and the area’s ecological history. Its concentric circular patterns are constructed from anodised aluminium. Some appear to emanate from an architectural column penetrating the central circle, like ripples from a reed touching water.

“The design is based on the rippling patterns that occur on still water and that would have been a constant feature of the marshland: patterns created by water droplets, or the undulations created around moving reeds or trees that once flourished in the wetland.”

— Catherine Woo

The work is for viewing from any direction that commuters take through the station. Its shapes look effortless and natural, but Catherine worked with the design team to place them on an odd-shaped canvas interrupted by dozens of columns, TV screens, lights, cameras and other station equipment.

Merinda Park station is in outer-suburban Melbourne. The new station building replaces an outdated one on the existing Cranbourne line. It is one of 110 sites in the Victorian Government’s massive Level Crossing Removal Project, which includes 51 new stations.

Catherine Woo

Catherine Woo is a graduate of Sydney College of the Arts and has a Graduate diploma of painting from the Australian National University, and a Masters of Fine Art from The University of Tasmania. At the core of her practice is her engagement with the weather as a creative agent in an expanded painting process. Since 1997, she has exhibited across Australia as well as internationally in the United Kingdom, Korea and Hong Kong.

At the core of her practice is her collaboration and experimentation with natural forces. Elements such as silica, carbon, ash, clay and rust combine or repel each other, crystallise and solidify into patterns that evoke flesh; rivers; plant forms; arteries; cloud patterns. The works could be aerial views of earth, imprints left in sediments at the bottom of a lake or microscopic snapshots from within the body.

Catherine has also completed major commissions for public corporate environments such as Visy Corporation in Melbourne, the Ritz Carlton Hotel in Shanghai, the Crown Casino in Macau, and the China World Trade Centre in Beijing.