By Greer Honeywill
On a chance visit to Palm Springs, the author was immediately drawn to the desert gardens and the elegant lines of the modernist houses from the postwar era. At once, she fell in love and was lost in the sheer immensity. It was then that she realised that being lost was the beginning of an idea. The idea grew into Lost in Palm Springs, developed over three residencies in Palm Springs bringing together artists, architects, photographers and thinkers from both sides of the Pacific. Creative minds who, on the one hand, capture or reimagine the magical qualities of mid-century modern domestic architecture set within the desert landscape of the Coachella Valley. And on the other hand, artists and photographers from Australia who explore mid-century modern architecture from Mt Eliza near Melbourne to Canberra, from Mermaid Beach on the Gold Coast to Sydney. And those who work backwards and forwards across the Pacific building bridges and drawing attention to place. In an era of radical transformation, it is calming, inspiring, and reassuring to lose yourself in the architecture of a dream.
The Author
Dr Greer Honeywill is an award-winning Australian
writer and conceptual artist, curator, researcher and
scholar based in Melbourne. She holds a PhD in Fine
Art from Monash University, Melbourne (2003) for
which she was awarded the Mollie Holman Doctoral
Medal for academic excellence, and a PhD in Fine
Art from the School of Creative Arts, University of
Tasmania (2015).
For more than three decades, Honeywill’s
interdisciplinary practice has embraced writing,
installation, constructed objects, architecture, text,
performance, photography and video. The domestic
built form, sense of place, and the inescapable patterns
of everyday existence have long been the prime focus of
her writing, art practice, and research.
Honeywill has written numerous commissioned essays
on art, architecture and design in books published
by Macmillan Art Publishing and Common Ground,
national and international art journals, and art gallery
publications supporting exhibitions. While living
in Tasmania, she wrote articles for Tasmanian Life,
Australian Art Review and Island Magazine. In America
she was commissioned by the founding director of
Copia: The American Center for Wine, Food and the Arts,
to write two essays. One for their biannual journal and
the second for the book, Setting the American Table:
Essays for the New Culture of Food and Wine. From
1984–86, while living in South Australia, she was design
writer for a prominent South Australian magazine.
For thirty years Honeywill has shown her artworks in
solo and group exhibitions and competitions. and her
works have been the subject of press articles, national
art magazines, articles in lifestyle magazines, television
and radio.
Inspired by her first brief experience of Palm Springs
in 2015, where she was overcome by the beauty and
intense spirit of place, she discovered that by focusing
on mid-century modern desert architecture, the diverse
subject matter of both her doctorates and decades of
art practice and writing came together as a cohesive
whole as though, inexplicably, she had planned for this
her entire life.
Published by Melbourne Books www.melbournebooks.com.au
Hard Cover, 275mm x 210mm Portrait, 256 pages Colour and B&W photos throughout.
RRP: AUD$69.95
ISBN: 9781922779007