The Canberra Chapter of the Walter Burley Griffin Society will host a lecture about Marion Mahony Griffin’s landscape art and architecture at the Shine Dome on Tuesday 25 October, 6pm. ‘The Silence of Mountains and the Music of the Sea’ will be presented by Christopher Vernon, Senior Lecturer in the Faculty of Architecture, Landscape and Visual Arts at the University of Western Australia.

Shortly after Marion Mahony wed Walter Burley Griffin, her world turned ‘upside down’, as she put it, when the couple left Chicago for Australia in 1914. Here, Marion and Walter’s encounters with the native landscape and its flora were a startling, revelatory experience. It emboldened them to advance their horticultural studies and led Marion to invent (around 1917) a highly-personal genre of botanical illustration that she titled ‘Forest Portraits’.

Marion’s Australian landscape artistry, however, was not confined to two dimensions. Further inspired, she then began to practice landscape architecture. In his illustrated lecture, Christopher Vernon will survey the results of this Australian efflorescence of Marion’s landscape arts, both graphic and landscape. The presentation will include numerous here-to-fore unpublished images.

Christopher Vernon’s lecture is derived from his chapter in the catalogue accompanying the Mary and Leigh Block Museum of Art’s (USA) new exhibition Marion Mahony Griffin: Drawing The Form of Nature. Opening in Chicago this September, this exhibition is the first to focus exclusively upon Marion Mahony Griffin. It is anticipated that Vernon’s lecture will also serve as the Australian launch of the catalogue, with copies available for purchase on the night.