Getting a train from Melbourne’s Flinders Street Station is pretty straightforward – just tap your myki, walk to your platform and wait for your train. While it’s efficient for the daily commute, you’re unlikely to ever get a closer look at the century-old hidden rooms inside Flinders Street Station, which is exactly why the famed artist Rone has opened an exhibition exploring them.
Called the Time exhibition, Rone has taken over Melbourne’s most historic train station this summer in a project that has taken more than three years to bring to life. Rone is best known for his world-renown large-scale portraits, which he has brought into the long-abandoned rooms of Flinders Street Station that had previously been locked up and unused for decades.
While his artworks are spectacular in and of themselves, Rone has taken a step further for this project by recreating a series of working-class settings from the middle of the last century, in an examination of the offices, factories and workshops that once existed throughout Melbourne. The rooms have been meticulously created with the help of more than 120 set builders, heritage experts and lighting designers to create a series of spaces filled with hundreds of period-correct objects such as mid-century typewriters and vintage industrial sewing machines.
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Speaking with Dezeen, Rone explained, “the aim is for audiences to be unsure where the artwork ends and where the original building starts.”
“I like the idea that someone could walk in here and think, ‘He’s just done a painting on a wall,’ and that everything else they see is a legitimate, original part of the building,” he continues. “For me, that’s the ultimate end-goal – it means it has worked.”
For a trip down memory lane and the opportunity to explore sections of Flinders Street Station that the public is normally banned from entering, make sure you check out this Rone exhibition over the next couple of months. It’s currently open and will run until Sunday 23 April.
