Steel beauty: Artist Mark McClelland with his sculpture, she thought.
Picture by Stephen Cooper

First-time entrant and major prize winner of this year's Sculpture by the Sea exhibition Mark McClelland created his colossal work after some divine inspiration. "I just wok up one day in the middle of last year with a drive to create a work specifically for this show," he says. "It came from God really".

Last night McClelland's large scale metal work she thought was top honours from more than 100 other pieces in the exhibition, scoring its delighted creater $30,000 in prizemoney. "It's just amazing, I can't really believe it, I'm sort of in shock," McClelland says. "I've loved the show for the last few years and I find this location such an inspirational thing,".

McClelland who has a background in design, has been working on the piece since July last year. The huge sculpture, made from steel and bronze, was especially designed for the Mark's Park venue of the exhibition, and McClelland hopes it will connect with its environment.

"There's a lot of activity here and the work is referencing that and there is a hole in [the sculpture] which is, at least to me, about containment. My hope is that nature will always resist efforts at containment and will run away into infinite space, which you see when you look at the horizon through the work."

It was a difficult and expensive process creating such a large work and McCleland is looking forward to using the prizemoney to fund the expense of making the piece and maybe some future sculptures. "The works on an industrial scale so some processes to bend the curves into it, had to be done using actual industrial processes," he says. "There was a significant cost to produce [the work] and the award will be unbelievably helpful in just allowing me to breathe a little bit financially again."