SXS



Penny and I went with our friends Karen and Tristan to Sculpture by the Sea this morning. It was a calm sunny day, and the cliff walk south of Bondi was as crowded as any art gallery during a blockbuster exhibition. These are the sculptures I was bidden to photograph with my phone camera.

Tristan with Why? by Jane Hosking:


Not actually a sculpture, but as you do the walk you start to look at shapes differently:


Postcard from Tamarama by Nicola Perkin (Tamarama being the name of the beach):


One of the Roadside Life series of signs by Sue Wicks:


Bondi Absolut by John Dahlsen (this giant vodka bottle appears to be constructed entirely of thongs, which, for the benefit of any US readers, are not items of intimate apparel but rubber footwear known also as flipflops and, in new Zealand, as jandals):


Daisy Chain, a 1.3 kilometre long work by Lola Giuffre:


I should mention a few of the many I didn't photograph:

Age of the Machines by Tim Wetherell, a gigantic hand with an ocean liner resting in its palm. The catalogue notes talk about it as part of an investigation into the possibly obsolete role of humans as makers in the machine age. I read it differently. It didn't occur to me to see the hand as the creator of the ship. Instead, it evoked for me the idea of the ocean as a tremendously powerful presence that can carry a ship safely, but just as easily crush it. (It might be relevant that I've just been reading about the Titanic disaster.)

High Anxiety by Michael Cordell, a pram perched on a sloping cliff edge with the taped sound of a baby crying in it. A little smugly, I note that I hadn't read the catalogue description of Michael Cordell as a "well-known filmmaker" when I thought of the famous scene from Battleship Potemkin in which a pram bounces down the steps in St Petersburg in the middle of an armed conflict. A very disturbing little piece, that stirred up a lot of nervous laughter, and certainly raised my pulse rate.

Swallow Rising by Marguerite Derricourt, an upright wire disc nearly two metres in diameter, with a kind of filigree pattern of swallows flying out from the centre. I suppose there were a lot of things in the show that were as beautiful as this, but for some reason this one laid claim to me, and I could have spent much more time with it.

Posted: Sun - November 7, 2004 at 01:38 PM           |

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