Adrian McGregor b. 1965

  • Artist
Adrian McGregor is a collaborative artist, landscape architect and urban designer whose works raise public awareness of environmental issues and sustainability.
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Adrian McGregor is a landscape architect, urban designer and public artist. He was born in 1965 in Newcastle, New South Wales. While in high school he had interests in both flora and design and worked part-time at a local plant nursery. By the end of his schooling McGregor decided to embark on a degree in landscape architecture.

From 1984 to 1987 he studied at the University of Canberra and received a Bachelor of Landscape Architecture. After graduating, he worked in Sydney before moving to the United Kingdom and North America to work on many environmental projects. Between 1994 and 1995 McGregor decided to further his educational qualifications by studying horticulture at the Gold Coast Institute of TAFE. In 1998 he founded mcgregor+partners, a landscape architecture and urban design firm based in Manly, a northern beach suburb of Sydney.

His art practice, whether working alone or collaboratively, shares many attributes with his landscape architecture. Embedded in outdoor spaces, he uses his public art to address themes of environmental awareness and sustainability. When working collaboratively with other artists, each participant contributes his or her knowledge and ideas into a creative process that is more than a sum of its parts. Three such projects include Amoeba (2004) Surrogate Trojan (2008), Lube Ring 101 (2008-09).

For Amoeba, McGregor collaborated with colleagues Rupert Carmichael and Christian Borchert in the installation of a temporary project that demonstrated qualities in both public and sustainable art. Displayed for a single day (28 October 2004) in Martin Place, Sydney, the project consisted of 132 amoeba-like cells made of used tyre rings painted white, pink, orange or blue (to attract attention), each filled with Stratum Green, a soil substitute made of used tyres, with the occasional sprinkler placed in the middle. Laid out in a grid on the granite-paved surface, the playful work demonstrated regeneration and expressed a desire to use temporary public art to provoke surprise and debate about excessive waste. In this instance it was a team of landscape architects who demonstrated the recyclability of bald tyres in a temporary symbolic art piece.

Surrogate Trojan was an outdoor collaborative project that McGregor worked on alongside architect/artists Russell Lowe and Richard Goodwin. Erected at Lee Wharf, Honeysuckle (Newcastle), Surrogate Trojan was part of Steffen Lehmann’s Back to the City project, in Newcastle, (24 January – 17 February 2008) and was awarded the prize for Best Installation in the Urban Context. In this work, a shipping container was filled with a bed of canola seeds, providing a setting for a short film on genetically modified (GM) foods. Strategically placed near a wharf where once there had been a protest against the importing of GM seeds, the work was designed to raise consciousness about inadequate food labelling as much as it also entertained visitors by raising the perils of GM foods sneaking through our harbours and into supermarket shelves.

Les Murray’s enigmatic short poem, Stone statues of ancient waves, tongue like dingoes on shore, announces a new model of collaboration for McGregor in the creation of Lube Ring 101 at Ballast Point, Sydney. Murray’s words, cut out of old oil tanks recycled from the site, are integrated into the skeletal cylindrical structure that also carries eight wind turbines to generate night lighting for the site. This permanent public artwork forms part of the Sydney Harbour Foreshore Authority collection.

Sustainability is the ethos behind McGregor’s public art installations as well as his more substantive landscape architecture and urban planning projects such as Chang Gung hospital (Taiwan, 1998), Parramatta Road (Sydney, 2001 and ongoing) and Green Square town centre (Sydney, 2001 and ongoing) to name a few.

His temporary art works aim to make the public aware of the environmental issues such as waste management or genetically modified foods, while his landscape architecture projects focus on long term sustainability.

Writers:
De Lorenzo, Dr Catherine Note: Catherine De Lorenzo is an art historian and senior lecturer at the Faculty of the Built Environment, UNSW.
Lin, Jason Note: In 2008 Jason Lin was studying Telecommunications Engineering at University of New South Wales.
Date written:
2008
Last updated:
2008
Status:
peer-reviewed