Take a look inside Rone: Street Art and Beyond

Known for his multi-storey murals gracing buildings all over the world, Melbourne-based artist Rone uses his work to explore the friction and connection between beauty and decay, youth and ruin. Rone: Street Art and Beyond is a new book that presents a survey of the artist’s work from the street, the studio, and the ephemeral installations. For an extremely limited time, we have copies of Rone: Street Art and Beyond that have been signed by the artist himself – pre-order yours today!*

You can take an early look inside this stunning book today, which isn’t out until the 30th of June. Read all about Rone’s Empire project below!

Empire

DATE: March–April 2019

LOCATION: Sherbrooke, Victoria, Australia

COLLABORATORS: Carly Spooner, interior stylist; Loose Leaf, organic sculptors; Nick Batterham, composer; Kat Snowden, scent designer

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Hundred-year-old gum trees buried any sense of city life on the final stretch of the journey through the forests of the Dandenong Ranges to Burnham Beeches, the Art Deco mansion that had lain vacant for over twenty-five years before Rone arrived. With Empire, Rone wanted to further the Omega project – increase the sense of loss, longing, decay and destruction, while adding many more multi-sensory triggers.

To experience Empire was to experience beauty in loss. The twelve rooms featured an evocative soundtrack, organic sculpture and the lingering scent of dead and dying leaves. Empire was twelve months in the making, inspiring a seasonal experience: guests could enter in winter, travel over two floors and across both wings, and finish in summer.

Every last spot of ceiling mould, curled and ripped strip of wallpaper, cobweb, chandelier – even the room flooded with 2000 litres of water, with armchairs and lamps cut down to give the impression of complete submergence – was carefully curated and installed.

Organic sculptors Loose Leaf created the illusion that the forest had taken over, spewing branches and leaves through every room with a broken window or cracked ceiling. Visitors were surrounded by aromas of all four seasons – dried grasses, fresh rain, dying flora – delicately crafted by scent designer Kat Snowden. The fourteen-channel music score, composed by Nick Batterham, haunted each wing of the mansion, with eerie notes playing as visitors passed the decaying grand piano and sombre cellos guiding them through ‘his’ and ‘hers’ rooms.

Carly Spooner’s meticulous period styling – the champagne-glass tower, the card game on pause, the hundreds of encyclopedias partially submerged due to a roof leak – created apparitions of former residents. Who were these people? Why did they leave? What was the meaning of the possessions they left behind? Guests concocted their own narratives of a fallen dynasty and past romances as they wandered through the mansion in a veritable ‘choose your own adventure’.

The legacy of the project lives on only in photos and other documentation. Through these records, viewers can almost hear the piano playing, smell the leaves, and sense the dust and cobwebs. They are a memoir of the sombre, stunning story of Empire.

Photo credits: Rone, 2019.

—Rone: Street Art and Beyond edited by Mo Wyse (Thames & Hudson), is out on the 30th of June.

*Only while stocks last.

Rone

Limited Signed Copies Available!

by Mo Wyse (Editor)

An evocative survey of street, studio and installation work by an influential fixture of Australian street art and global pioneer pushing the boundaries of immersion, destruction and scale.

Known for his multi-storey murals gracing buildings all over the world, Melbourne-based artist Rone uses his work to explore the friction and connection between beauty and decay, youth and ruin. Rone was a seminal figure in...

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