Katherine Junk Festival a celebration of rusty cans, barbed wire, broken lawnmowers and creativity

It took Michelangelo four years to paint the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. It took about the same amount of time for Brendan Penzer’s dogs to eat through enough tins of food to supply the materials for his new sculptural masterpiece. “All the tins you see … have been consumed by my dogs. And in fact, all the materials in these sculptures have been collected from my own property.” His trio of scrap-metal dogs are built on a frame made from discarded builders’ sawhorses, with heads made from broken lawnmowers. They were created for Katherine’s Junk Festival – an annual celebration of recycling that draws crowds of thousands to the Top End regional hub. Mr Penzer’s work is a rusty reflection on the sometimes wasteful use of water. “You see a lot of water being used to grow these green lawns, which are quite alien to this environment,” he said. From Hollywood to the Junk Festival Penny Fawkner’s former job as a commercial sculptor saw her work on films including Babe: Pig in the City and the Matrix series. But she says she much prefers rummaging through sheds for junk to turn into art for the Junk Festival. “I love the fact that we’re using all junk, because one of the things that used to worry me when I was working in the industry was, just so much wasted material went into it,” Ms Fawkner said. Her sculpture draws attention to the suffering of civilians in the war in Gaza. “It is a simple message of love and peace.” Ms Fawkner says the junk festival is a way of democratising art. It is “not elitist”. The Met Gala of rubbish On festival night, the centrepiece is a runway parade of costumes made from junk. “People love to dress up,” said organiser Jacinta Mooney from Katherine Regional Arts. “This is dressing up in junk … people who you wouldn’t think would be necessarily interested in that. “I guess it’s a safe environment to be able to do that because everyone else is looking silly as well.” The town’s market grounds were full of a crowd that represented a cross-section of Katherine’s diverse community. “There aren’t many events that people from all quarters of the community come along to — and this one is famous for that,” Ms Mooney said. Like many outback towns, Katherine does not have curbside recycling. Ms Mooney said that leads to people developing a crafty resourcefulness to get what they can out of what they have. “It’s about repurposing stuff, reducing what we consume and recycling. “Recycling’s pretty hard … in an outback town like ours, but junk fest is a reminder to people to think about what they consume.”