Artifacts from Metro Project Nicholas Building 2018

Summary

Jill Anderson is represented by the Stephen McLaughlan Gallery, located in the historic Nicholas Building, on the corner of Swanston Street and Flinders Lane. The building overlooks not only the city’s main bitumen artery, but also the Town Hall station site of the Victorian government’s Metro Tunnel project. A complex piece of infrastructure comprising five new stations and many kilometres of underground tracks, the project builds on the existing commuter rail system to meet the city’s ever-expanding public transport needs.

In March 2019, Anderson exhibited a suite of detailed pencil drawings made in 2018 that document work at the Town Hall site. In the early phase of the Metro Tunnel project, extensive archaeological work revealed the layers of social history that laid beneath this site and tell the narrative of its past since settlement. More than a million artefacts have been retrieved to date, including the bottles, shards and other objects depicted in this drawing, along with some of the tools for exposing them.

This drawing and two others were purchased for the Art and Heritage Collection at the time of the exhibition, titled ‘Site Works’, at which gallery-goers could look out the window to see in real-time the project’s progress. These works form a conversation of sorts with an earlier drawing by Anderson held in collection that shows nine views of central Melbourne from the same building before the tunnel works began. You can find this composite drawing by searching this website using the artist’s name.