When Matt Sykes learned he won a $4,000 traveling scholarship to use however he wanted, the 23-year-old Australian decided to use the money to help pay for airline tickets to visit Japan, Spain, Mexico and Vancouver.
No, not that other Vancouver. Vancouver, Washington.
Sykes made the decision after stumbling on the Confluence Project’s Web site, http://confluenceproject.org. The project’s combination of history, storytelling and land use encapsulate what Sykes tries to achieve in his own projects, he said.
“I wanted to learn more about the people behind (the Confluence Project) and other things I couldn’t see over the Internet from the other side of the world,” Sykes said. “This is only project like this in the world.”
Sykes said he particularly appreciated that the project places different pieces of art along Lewis and Clark’s trail to the Pacific Ocean and invites people to travel through the American landscape to learn more about it and the Corps of Discovery’s historic journey.
“The project crosses a lot of boundaries,” Sykes said. “The artworks tell a story, but don’t dictate how to interpret it, allowing each person to have an individual experience.”
Sykes graduated in March 2009 from the University of Melbourne in Melbourne, Victoria, with a bachelor of landscape architecture. The state of Victoria lies on the southeast corner of Australia and is just north of Tasmania.
Sykes’ senior project, “Sustainable Dreaming,” won high praise from his university and was submitted for the Hassell scholarship. It was a conceptual plan to transform a rail yard from a contaminated, post-industrial site into an area that is able to sustainably support a full-time population.
“I wasn’t really thinking about the scholarship when I started my project,” Sykes said. There are six universities in Australia that have landscape architecture courses; three top students from each university were interviewed for the scholarship, he said.
Sykes will be heading back to Australia on Friday, where he works for landscape practice Sinatra Murphey.
“I don’t know exactly what I’m going to do next,” he admitted. “But I’m looking forward to finding out what it is.”
Paul Suarez: 360-735-4530 or paul.suarez@columbian.com.
