Major Commissions in 2008

We made a number of interesting sculptures in 2008. Two were personal favourites, really. The first was Stiltwalkers, which was commission by the City of Monash for the new Wellington Community Centre in Mulgrave (Victoria, Australia). The Community Centre was designed as a new home for the local Community House (with all its wonderful courses and activities), for the Boy Scouts and Girl Guides, and for a childcare centre. The sculpture needed to be welcoming and had to complement the architecture of the new building. Even more importantly, we felt, it had to be light hearted and fun.

Very quickly we settled on the concept of stilt walkers. Why? Because stilt walking often happens during community celebrations (and the building was all about celebrating community) and stilt walking is one of those crazy skills that almost everyone has a go at acquiring (and everyone using the centre was involved in having a go at acquiring new skills). The other thing we liked about stilt walking was that it is slightly dangerous and scary, but in an exhilarating way.

We ended up creating three stilt walkers who make their way across a marshy landscape. All the stilt walkers are upright, but it looks as though one of them is about to grab hold of the figure in front – and then they’ll all come down. Or maybe they won’t…

The three figures have patterns etched into their stainless steel surfaces: knots for the Scouts; clover leaves for the Guides, and streamers and confetti for the community house. Anu Patel collaborated with us on the design work for the patterns.

The second sculpture that featured strongly in 2008 was Memory Land Ocean, which was commissioned by the City of Greater Geelong for Hitchcock Avenue in Barwon Heads (Victoria, Australia). The sculpture was commissioned to celebrate the 75^th anniversary of the Great Ocean Road as originally conceived by Howard Hitchcock (former Mayor of Geelong). I found this project really exciting. Commemorating the GOR was an important project and… I had a family connection to the town. I spent all of the summers of my adolescence on the beach at Barwon Heads and my mother’s family first began holidaying there in the 1920s.

The GOR was built as a World War I memorial and is a wonder in terms of its extraordinary beauty; the sheer hard physical work involved in its construction by the returned soldiers who were employed to create it; and in terms of the foresight and vision of Howard Hitchcock, who really drove the project. The irony is that Barwon Heads (where the commemorative sculpture is installed) isn’t on the GOR. But… Barwon Heads was part of Hitchcock’s original vision. It was meant to have been the starting point for the GOR.

As you can see, this was a complex brief to work with and representing all that complexity in an artwork was a challenge. We ended up working with the physical elements and the geography of the GOR. The shape of the sculpture arose from the map of the coastline between Barwon Heads and Warrnambool. The detail on one side of the sculpture (the gold buttons) link it to the towns along the route. The two rusted plates are aspects of the continent: one face before white settlement; the other face after white settlement. The rusted plates are separated by a gusset. The gusset is the Great Ocean Road itself and it is also the clear vision of Howard Hitchcock.