Admirers locked out

WHEN we began The Cardinian Embroidery in 2004, we planned it as a tourist attraction for the shire.
VicHealth granted us funds to make “a lasting major artwork of heritage value… and a focus for the development of tourism in Cardinia”.
We fulfilled the heritage requirements by including most of the significant historical features in the shire and following textile convention guidelines in our choice of materials and techniques to ensure that the panels will last for centuries.
Achieving the tourism aspect has not been so easy.
Friends of the Cardinia Embroidery (FOTCE) managed to independently raise enough money to have a brochure printed in October 2008, and this has resulted in a stead stream of visitors to view our work.
Unfortunately these tourists cannot get into the Cardinia Cultural Centre at weekends and members of the local communities who worked on the embroideries can’t take their weekend visitors to admire their contribution.
The Cardinia Cultural Centre seems to have become the Cardinia Conference Centre – open mainly during business hours, except for the occasional performance or catered even mostly attended by locals or invited guests.
Casual visitors meet closed doors at weekends.
The original “Community Arts Area” has long been labelled “Seminar Room”; the massive “Arts Workshop” is used for storage of theatre sets and catering equipment; the “Gallery” is no such thing.
Artists hang their works on the only two walls available, hold an expensive exhibition opening and then see the public turned away, not just at weekends but also during the week when the space is used for meetings – sometimes all day.
It is disheartening, to say the least, to read council’s proud announcements of the millions of dollars to be spent on yet another sports complex when so much less would be needed to fund staff in the cultural centre for those crucial two days per week when people have the time and inclination to visit places like this.
The Cardinian Embroidery was intended to be only the first of several community art projects to take place in the Cultural Centre.
There is little likelihood of any others happening when the arts community is so effectively shut out of what was supposed to be their centre of activity.
Eleanor Taylor,
President, FOTCE