AXIS

Artists: Luke George & Phaenomenon

Commissioned for: Pitch Music & Arts Festival 2026
Curated by: Anna Nalpantidis & Tom Supple

Mar 2026
Gariwerd / The Grampians
Djab Wurrung and Eastern Maar Country

Photography: Courtesy of the artists and Pitch.

Responding to the escarpment of Gariwerd (Grampians) and the unfolding dynamics of the Pitch Music & Arts Festival, this installation by artist Luke George worked with a mass of orange rope and tension to draw lines across the earth and sky. Anchored to one of the site’s epic River Red Gums, this giant hand-woven web mapped the space between the organic and the engineered, the seen and the sensed. Luke’s intention was to transform ‘the line’ from a static mark into a physical, load-bearing bond that activates the negative space between people, and with the natural environment and place.

With lighting and projection design created by Phaenomenon, at night the installation became a glowing, pulsing network of colour, texture and movement. Ephemeral and ever-evolving, the design transformed constantly from dusk to dawn, in concert with the shifts in natural light and undulations of festival energy.

Located in the centre of Pitch’s Arena, AXIS activated as a soft anchor, a compass for free-flowing social choreographies of festival goers traversing the open landscape as they travel between Pitch stages. As people moved towards, around and through these rope structures, they encountered the energy of the site and the people around them. A tactile invitation to reconnect to community and to Country amidst the intensity of the festival, where our shared tension created a new lived architecture of social exchange and woven interconnectedness.