An expanse of sweeping metallic facades and converging public concourses, Federation Square is a bustling hub of cultural, tourist and business activities—an ideal arena for contemporary artists to interrogate the potential of sculpture within the urban environment. The six finalists of the third instalment of the Melbourne Prize for Urban Sculpture—Isaac Greener and Lucas Maddock, Bianca Hester, Sonia Leber and David Chesworth, Clive Murray-White, Tom Nicholson and Stuart Ringholt—took on this challenge in the first half of November 2011. Dispersed throughout the architecturally diverse topography of the site and presented for just two weeks, the works were under constant threat of being overwhelmed by the swell of daily activities taking place in this popular and transitory civic space. This was a major strength of the exhibition. Rather than adhering to conventional notions of public sculpture, the kind embodied by the Russian collective AES+F’s spectacularly monumental and highly polished works Angels-Demons. Parade, which were installed throughout the city as part of the Melbourne Festival earlier in the year, the prize offered a more experimental and provisional vision of sculpture within the public realm.
A large contingent of works were structured around the temporal parameters of the exhibition and were highly dependent on the active participation of the general public. Bianca Hester’s A world, fully accessible by no living being (2011) (winner of the prize) invited people to take part in a number of events, in locations across the city, throughout the duration of the exhibition. Hester constructed a rudimentary cinder-block wall at Federation Square as an anchorage point for the work from which broadsheets were distributed detailing a schedule of daily actions and performances. These assorted events included a hoop