Park No 2, designed by Yvonne Boag in 2009, was funded by several Victorian Government departments: the Department of Premier and Cabinet, the Education Department and Arts Victoria. The tapestry was gifted to the Victorian International School in Sharjah, United Arab Emirates, to celebrate the relationship between the school and the state of Victoria.

Sharjah is the third largest city in the United Arab Emirates, after Dubai and Abu Dhabi, with a population of 800,000. It is located approximately 50 km north of Dubai and overlooks the Persian Gulf.

Established in 2007, the Victorian International School provides a Victorian based curriculum for the international community of Sharjah. When designing this tapestry, Boag sought to reflect the physical landscape of Victoria, while being mindful of the needs of the school’s multicultural student community and respectful of the cultural traditions of the predominantly Muslim Sharjah population.

Boag’s design functions as a description of the soft grey green gums and harmonious colours of the sometimes sparse Australian bush. The meditative, abstracted landscape will provide a memory of home for Australian students and a view of an exotic land faraway for students from elsewhere. The design was one of 7 gouache studies produced by the artist in preparation for the commission. The works have an open composition and a tranquil flow, that belies the unsettled danger of the blackened tree trunks. The final design contains a young, supple tree in the centre of the design. This tree, bursting into life, is a suitable metaphor for a school environment.

In interpreting this small painting into tapestry, the weavers had to make some complicated colour choices. When interpreting an artwork into tapestry, the change in scale and medium effects how the colours interact with each other and the forms within the work. The palette of this series has very pastel tones. The shades in this work are too pale for many of our woollen yarn colours. All of what appear to be large flat planes of colour are in fact made up of several tones of yarn. A high proportion of cotton has been used in some of the colours, as the cotton holds dye in a different way to woollen yarns and can be dyed to match much paler tones.