Beneath showcases Ceitas Atelier’s Prologue, research into Australian artists, and an index of stimuli to effectively curate it’s desired presence.
Prologue
Design - Christian Duyckers
Investigative Research, Conversations
Visual Compendium - Ceitas Atelier
Shells, 2024.
Photographing seashells is more than a way of admiring their beauty; it is a means of engaging closely with the details of the natural world. The camera forces attention to aspects often overlooked: the intricate spirals, the subtle ridges, and the way light plays across the surface.
A shell, so small and seemingly simple, becomes a study in texture, form, and pattern, revealing both complexity and order. Through photography, it is possible to explore the tension between fragility and resilience, impermanence and permanence, surface and structure. Seashells carry histories that are rarely obvious at first glance. Each one is the remnant of an organism’s life, shaped by currents, tides, and time.
Photographing them invites reflection on these processes, as well as on human interaction with nature.
Collecting shells or arranging them for photographs raises questions about our desire to possess and categorise the natural world. Photography mediates this interaction, allowing us to examine these objects while preserving the context of their origin—or, in some cases, transforming it entirely.
Creative experimentation further expands what seashell photography can accomplish. Extreme close-ups can render a familiar object almost unrecognisable, turning ridges into landscapes and spirals
into endless pathways. Water, dew, and reflective surfaces introduce movement and light that challenge the notion of a shell as a static object. These choices illustrate how photography mediates experience: it allows us to explore the ordinary in extraordinary ways, questioning assumptions about scale, beauty, and significance.
Ultimately, photographing seashells is a negotiation between observation and interpretation. It highlights the tension between what is given and what is perceived, between the material reality of the shell and the narrative created through the lens.
Each image becomes a site of enquiry, prompting reflection on form, meaning, and human perception. The act of photographing transforms these small, often overlooked objects into subjects of artistic exploration and philosophical contemplation of time. These photographs, like the illustrations, engage with this enquiry of time and, more specifically, demonstrate how this exploration has shaped the project.
A shell, so small and seemingly simple, becomes a study in texture, form, and pattern, revealing both complexity and order. Through photography, it is possible to explore the tension between fragility and resilience, impermanence and permanence, surface and structure. Seashells carry histories that are rarely obvious at first glance. Each one is the remnant of an organism’s life, shaped by currents, tides, and time.
Photographing them invites reflection on these processes, as well as on human interaction with nature.
Collecting shells or arranging them for photographs raises questions about our desire to possess and categorise the natural world. Photography mediates this interaction, allowing us to examine these objects while preserving the context of their origin—or, in some cases, transforming it entirely.
Creative experimentation further expands what seashell photography can accomplish. Extreme close-ups can render a familiar object almost unrecognisable, turning ridges into landscapes and spirals
into endless pathways. Water, dew, and reflective surfaces introduce movement and light that challenge the notion of a shell as a static object. These choices illustrate how photography mediates experience: it allows us to explore the ordinary in extraordinary ways, questioning assumptions about scale, beauty, and significance.
Ultimately, photographing seashells is a negotiation between observation and interpretation. It highlights the tension between what is given and what is perceived, between the material reality of the shell and the narrative created through the lens.
Each image becomes a site of enquiry, prompting reflection on form, meaning, and human perception. The act of photographing transforms these small, often overlooked objects into subjects of artistic exploration and philosophical contemplation of time. These photographs, like the illustrations, engage with this enquiry of time and, more specifically, demonstrate how this exploration has shaped the project.
Photography - Christian Duyckers
Stimuli Index
Ceitas reliably credits these artists where due. The use of these images is purely for innovative purposes, cultivating as an index of stimuli.
Published on the occasion of the exhibition: "New Itineraries", Musée de'Elysée,
Lausanne, June 13 - September 8, 1991
Measurements: 58.6 × 92.7 × 36.7 cm
National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne. Purchased, 1985.
©The estate of Inge King
David Noonan, 2017, Common Editions.
Jungjin Lee, 2025
Sidney Nolan, 1940.
Oil on canvas, mounted on composition board, 73.3 x 88.2 cm
Barbara Hepworth, London, 1943-1958.
Plaster on wood base.
12 ⅞ x 15¾ x 11⅞ in
Hashimoto Naotsugu, 2003. 11.2 × 6.2 cm
Alexander Calder, 1936.
Lignum vitae, walnut wood, paint and steel rods.
51⅞ x 24¼ x 11⅜ in
Deborah Turbeville, 1976.
High Diver I
Gerhard Richter, 1965. Oil On Canvas 190 x 110cm
Provoke Group, Tokyo, Nitesha, 2023
The plan pivots around a courtyard archetype that reads as both climatic strategy and cultural device. In a landscape of extremes, the courtyard functions as a sheltered public room: an outdoor waiting area, a gathering place, a “park inside the building” where hardy eucalypts will eventually shade timber decking and where rain — rare and dramatic — briefly remakes the site. This interior exterior is where the building does its most careful social work: it mediates clinical formality and communal life, allowing health care to feel like belonging rather than intrusion.
What happens on the walls matters as much as what happens within them. The Hub incorporates artworks by nineteen artists from five communities, chosen by the community itself and transcribed by the architects into patterns that can be fabricated as sun-screens and gates. These screens are instruments of light and narrative: by day they filter luminous patterns into clinical rooms; by night, lit from within, they become a cultural beacon across the public realm. The architects’ role in “transcribing” community imagery is described as painstaking and respectful — yet it also raises the careful question any critic must ask: how does translation from paint to perforated metal change the work’s agency and meaning? The answer here, as the project suggests, depends on process — community selection, iterative co-design and sensitivity to nuance — not only output. Kaunitz Yeung Architecture
The Hub’s sustainability is practical rather than pious. Rammed earth walls and endemic landscaping lower running costs and, paired with a 150 kW rooftop solar array, aim to deliver the majority of the building’s electricity on sunny days — a material-economic strategy intended to redirect funds into care rather than utilities. It’s an architectural economy that matters in remote health infrastructure: reduced operating cost equals more clinical appointments, more visiting specialists, more care kept on-country. In that arithmetic, design choices are instruments of public health.
There is also a political and cultural choreography at work. The project is explicitly a facility “for the first time” to deliver community-controlled, culturally appropriate services in Newman; the PAMS board includes representatives from the remote communities the clinic serves, and the architecture was developed through long-term, iterative co-design — the architects recount informal “yarning” sessions across town as formative. The result reads as an instance of critical regionalism: contemporary, technically adept architecture that refuses placeless modernism and insists on civic belonging.
Images: Robert Frith
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