Urban Blog
Quentin Dempster, host of Stateline in New South Wales, has agreed to take us on a last minute tour of Sculpture by the Sea, it closes on Sunday.
Now its 12th year, more than half a million people are expected to have done the Tamarama-Bondi walk to breathe the fresh air, look at the ocean and admire the 107 sculptures.
Exhibited in Sculpture by the Sea Sydney in 2009 and chosen as a finalist in the UWS Art Priize and Exhibition in 2010. Of memory is trying to connect two points in the landscape. The work is straining against its material limitations, reaching out from one fixed point in an unsupported, cantilevered span. It responds to an idea of landscape and our individual capacities for risk and commitment.
she thought started with a poem I wrote to Aram, imagining how she might respond to the landscape of the coastal walk at Bondi. I had spent a great deal of time in the location clarifying my own thoughts about it and developing initial studies for the work, but it was when I viewed the landscape from an imagining of my wife’s perspective that these studies began to resolve.
Integral to my creative process was the role of this particular landscape. The work grew straight from the place and it says some of the things I feel about this, and other landscapes. I like the idea that nature cannot be contained, and I've tried to express that. she thought also represents a transition – a time in which the more cerebral nature of my past life in design connects with a deeper level of feelings that inform my art practice.
In this movement between worlds, she thought is helping me to delineate how I’d like to work. The sculpture is a vessel, not only referencing all the craft of sea, sky and land that pass that way, but also a symbolic vessel in which I can travel, helping me to define my ideas and method for the future while navigating toward it. The conceptual vessel is important to me. My own view of the world has been dramatically influenced by the vessels with which I have navigated it, and I suspect that experience is a common one.
she thought brings the accumulation of those experiences into one place and centres them within an iconic Sydney landscape.
The rough-hewn artworks of Stephen King, a rugged sheep and cattle farmer from the NSW town of Walcha, have been exhibited in Sculpture by the Sea no fewer than 11 times. That includes this year's event, which features naturally fallen stringybark trees from King's property, Blackfellows Gully, transformed by the artist into a sculpture with the none-too-subtle aid of a chainsaw.
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".
Skilful placement played a large role in determining the winner of this year's $30,000 NAB Sculpture Prize: Mark McClelland's she thought - a flat rectangle of steel with a key-shaped hole, thought which one observes the horizon where the sea meets the sky. The sheer simplicity of the work is appealing, although the choice cannot have been easy for this year's judge, Terence Maloon, from the Art Gallery of NSW.
Sunshine and whales... What a difference a day makes! After three days of wild storms, this morning early visitors to the exhibition were greeted by a beautiful sunrise and the extra surprise of two separate pods of whales frolicking off the point at Marks Park. The park itself is now full of school groups enjoying the sculptures, and the weather for the weekend is predicted to be fine again. In today's email we are featuring a number of the prize winning sculptures from the 2008 exhibition.The NAB Sculpture Prize is the major prize at Sculpture by the Sea, Bondi 2008, and was awarded to Mark McClelland for his work 'she thought'. Photo Jamie Williams
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".
