Bilateral Petersham: Lucas Ihlein, 2006.


For two months (April-May 2006) Lucas Ihlein did not leave the boundaries of his home suburb of Petersham in Sydney. During this "artist-in-residence" in his own neighbourhood, he wrote a daily blog about the everyday events he experienced.

The blog was later presented as a large-scale installation where visitors could compile their own hard-copy book (approximately 80,000 words) to take home.

Bilateral Petersham is the second of Ihlein's blogging as art projects. It is the sequel to Bilateral Kellerberrin (2005), a project which took place in a small country town in Western Australia.



More info about Bilateral Petersham


Bilateral Petersham and Bilateral Kellerberrin were the two major case studies in Lucas Ihlein's PhD thesis, entitled Framing Everyday Experience: Blogging as Art, Deakin University, 2010. Ihlein was awarded the Alfred Deakin Medal for Best Doctoral Thesis in the Humanities and Social Sciences, 2011.

Bilateral Petersham was supported by a community art and culture project grant from Marrickville Council.

The first Bilateral Petersham exhibition was held at Chrissie Cotter Gallery, Camperdown, Sydney, in June 2006.

Bilateral Petersham was included in Publicity, an exhibition curated by Reuben Keehan at Artspace, Sydney, in May-June 2007. You can see photos of the show here (photos by Roderick Hietbrink).

Publicity toured to CACSA in Adelaide in October 2007.

Bilateral Petersham was exhibited in 2009 at the George Paton Gallery in Melbourne.

An article about Bilateral Petersham appeared in the Sydney Morning Herald on 19 April, 2006: Sunanda Creagh, Sham Artist Refuses to Push Boundaries. (Scan of print article here.)

Sarah McInerney, "Artist Finds a Friendly connection in the 'burbs", Glebe and Inner Western Weekly, May 17, 2006.

Interview with Anna Burns on FBI radio about Bilateral Petersham, on 6 August 2006.

Lucas Ihlein was invited to speak about Bilateral Petersham and his other blogging-as-art projects at Fullscreen 08: Explorations in digital media: communion, community and communication at the NGA in Canberra.

Reuben Keehan, Double Agents: Complication in Recent Performance, Art & Australia, Spring 2009.

Reuben Keehan's catalogue for the exhibition of Publicity at CACSA in Adelaide in 2007.

Lucas Ihlein spoke about Bilateral Petersham and Bilateral Kellerberrin at Taking it to the Streets forum, Next Wave Festival, 2010. (Short review here by Julia McGrath, and another one here by Megan Garrett Jones)

Bilateral Petersham is discussed in Estelle Barrett's essay "Materiality, Affect, and the Aesthetic Image" pp. 63-73, in Estelle Barrett and Barbara Bolt, Carnal Knowledge: Towards a 'New Materialism' through the Arts, IB Tauris, 2013.

Lucas Ihlein, "Blogging as Art, Art as Research", (chapter on Bilateral Petersham), in Material Inventions: Applying Creative Arts Research, edited by Barbara Bolt and Estelle Barrett, IB Tauris, 2014.

Brief mention in article discussing place blogging by Keri Glastonbury, "Rough and Tumblr: Blogging Newcastle", in LINQ Connected Writing and Scholarship, Vol 42-43, 2016.

A story from Bilateral Petersham was adapted for Barbara Campbell's 1001 Nights Cast project.

Lucas Ihlein, “Blogging as Art: Life Writing Online”, in Donna Lee Brien and Quinn Eades (eds), Offshoot: Contemporary Life Writing Methodologies and Practices, UWA Press, 2018.