Assistant Professor Catie Newell leads intensive studio workshop for the 2013 Urban Islands in Sydney, Australia

Urban Islands is a bi-annual independent cross university program that brings renowned architectural practitioners from around the world to Sydney’s Cockatoo Island. Guest tutors each run an intensive 12-day workshop on and amongst the setting of Cockatoo, a decommissioned shipyard and prison labor camp. Through processes of inhabitation and insinuation, each studio questions and agitates the existing setting of the island, challenging site-specific place making within an in creating mediated world. Newell lead a team of students from 5 different Australian Universities in a photography, drawing, and site-specific installation studio.

Newell’s workshop, Suspension, was invested in the premise that across time existing spaces take on unexpected definitions and dimensions both physically and conceptually. Prompting mischievous, ephemeral, and misplaced occupation, the atmosphere instilled is an eerie tension between rightful occupation and being altogether elsewhere. It is in multiple states of suspension.

The island was explored through a series of installations as a means to instigate spatial distortions and to apply temporary pressure on what physically and perceptually exists. The work embraces and amplifies the idea of suspension; manipulating the existing spaces with the intention to make compelling new environments that provoke and deny occupation.

The themes and aspirations of the four groups were:

• The Unobtainable Truths: Spatial and Optical Relocations
• The Other: Disappearances
• Falling: A Reconsideration of a Falsified Ground
• Immaterial: Absorbing Darkness