Comment and art news
Art Head Land, the sculpture component of the Festival of Darwin, was described by Festival Director, Fabrizio Calafuri, "as a collection of context or site specific temporary installation works in public places". The works I will discuss all established a necessary and imperative relationship with their immediate surroundings.
Migration Sites: On Mindil Beach on the wide margin of hard sand between the low water mark and the high tide line, Chilean born artist, Techy Mesaro made Taking Off, a large bamboo sculpture, some fifteen metres long and eight metres high consisting of a mythical bird carrying a boat on its back, rather like the bird in the Arabian Nights which carried Sinbad the Sailor. The fine long open beak of the bird and the prow of the boat pointed into the wind and toward the sea. It was constructed around four massive bamboo poles dug deep into the sand, which formed the masts of the boat.
Further along this beach there are wooden cradles into which, allow tide, cranes lilt keeled boats to wait for the incoming tide to float them off. In Taking Off, the bamboo bird was the cradle, its long wing tips sweeping the sand and it seemed to be ready to launch the bamboo boat on a long journey across the Arafura Sea to somewhere else. During the highest tides twice monthly, when the water level rises up to three metres, the body of the bird was submerged and the boat did seem to float on the sea.
As you came down onto the beach, with the setting sun behind it, the structure looked airy, it might have been made of copper... The rest of this article is available to subscribers of Eyeline