This installation was part of Sculpture by the Sea Bondi-Tamarama 2024. Sculpture by the Sea is one of the bigger sculpture events on the local calendar. With over a hundred entries, the show stretches from the south end of Bondi Beach to Tamarama and is viewed by a lot of people. I wasn’t looking for the big statement here. I also wanted to create a work that was a little more loose and expressive then my geometric and colour-field pieces and the environment really lent itself to this approach. I already had numerous photographs of sites along this coast the ones which appealed to me were these smaller intimate locations down away from the headlands with their windswept vistas. Gaerloch reserve is in between Marks park and Tamarama point and you could consider it to be a beach under construction. There is a slight bay here with a low cliff slowly being worn away by the surf and I’m sure in several hundred thousand years it will be a nice sandy cove. However in 2024 it remains a rugged stretch of narrow coast with patches of grass here and there framing various sandstone outcrops. The site which appealed to me was uneven small and turned away from the coast. No pointy uppy thing could look dramatic against a backdrop of coastal succulents, banksias, grass and over hanging houses but It was perfect for what I wanted to evoke.

The scale of a work determines how a spectator takes it in, either in small sections or in its totality. This work was in small in stature. placed up against the grassed bank of the reserve but offered convenient viewing for visitors walking the adjacent path. They could slip past the work and take in its colours like the layers of a shifting sunset with the rocks within it floated like islands in a fiery archipelago. But if anyone chose to conduct a drifting series of viewing passes the appearance of the piece would alter, bring into play the sites undulating surface, rocks and coarse grass to form an ever changing experience. The text I wrote for the work describes the unpainted stones as mental state of inertia brought on by grief and loss with the surrounding colour areas representing life going on in all its diversity and richness. Sometimes we find ourselves as islands in a swirling sea passing us by. And so we could remain until we are brave enough to take steps back into the torrent.

But times changes what ever meaning we ascribe to a work. Every viewer takes away their own experience. For some that is a superficial one, perhaps one of indifference. Maybe transcendence. It doesn’t matter.