Top-shelf sculptures elevate artform

ASK Robert Lindsay what defines an accomplished work of sculpture and he'll tell you that, for him, the same rules apply in sculpture as any artistic discipline: "The work must open the eyes and tease the mind." The director of McClelland Gallery Sculpture Park has had his mind teased on multiple fronts in preparation for this year's McClelland Survey, which opened to the public yesterday with the announcement of the 2010 award, whose winner takes home $100,000 in prizemoney.

Much of this teasing has, he says, proved intensely fruitful. From the development and delivery of works from each of this year's 34 finalists, to finding a suitable nook in the park's 16-hectare site for each to occupy, Lindsay's task also involved arranging sculptures along the bushland trails to produce playful, compelling and provocative juxtapositions of shape, colour and approach.

He may not face the same quandaries the National Gallery of Victoria encounters when it ships in the works of, say, Ron Mueck pulling doors off hinges but Lindsay must instead figure out how to crane four-tonne sculptures into dense thickets of ti-tree.

Chance encounters with nature a bird perching on a work to sing or sun breaking through clouds to halo another take visitors "off the usual tram tracks of looking at art in a typical gallery setting", says the director, "inviting them to see and interpret works in fresh and dynamic ways".

Several of this year's finalists play with the notion of contemporary Australian identity. Geoffrey Ricardo's whimsical Emblemic captures a man dressed in a giant kangaroo suit and gumboots pushing a miniature shopping trolley, while Colin Suggett's National Anxiety Index reveals a corrugated iron and barbed wire cutout of the nation guarded by an angry griffin perched atop a broken scale.

No less provocative is Joanne Mott's Australia re-generated, which subverts the botanical tradition of the garden map by tracing the contours of our shores in native rather than exotic blooms. Robbie Rowlands toys with another national symbol in Fell for Silo, splicing a wheat silo and a nearby tree trunk into neat, sequential slices to produce a pair of fractured spines. In Jason Waterhouse's Glory days, another Aussie icon, the Holden HQ Kingswood station wagon, is warped: the car's bonnet is curled so the front right wheel rests on a plinth, imbuing the vehicle with a surreal, animated quality. You half expect its headlight to wink.

Human relationships with nature gone awry underpin Adrian Mauriks's Strange fruit, a cluster of sensuous white forms that loom as otherworldy yet seductive spawns of genetic modification, although the name comes from the bitter lynching song Billie Holliday made famous in the 1930s. Mutation on a smaller scale occurs in Jonathan Leahey's DNA II, in which a series of rusted steel cube molecules unfurl to reveal a single mirror cube; the process of mitosis has produced a renegade cell.

Dean Colls's toils have produced Alexander the Great, a monster steel cockroach for whom the laws of nature don't apply. Greg Johns's To the Centre II, by contrast, uses the flow of waterways as its inspiration; the sculpture's steel arcs and limbs embrace changing patterns from different perspectives, each as magical as the previous.

The intersection between man, nature and technology plays out in the kinetic works of both James Kenyon, whose Space Junk from Adelaide imagines vestiges from a parallel universe, and Laura Woodward's Wring, a series of cylindrical contraptions that, appearing at first like wind chimes, writhe in a whirring ballet when they sense a human presence.

Jud Wimhurst's A moment of media-tation gets its best reception when the weather is sunny; the sculpture comprises three super-sized televisions whose screens reflect the surrounding bush.

With the demise of the Helen Lempriere Sculpture Award earlier this year, the McClelland Gallery's biennial Sculpture Survey, which is supported by the Elisabeth Murdoch Sculpture Foundation and the Balnaves Foundation, has become Australia's richest and most prestigious acquisitive sculpture award.

It is a responsibility not lost on Lindsay, who says the importance of the survey in nurturing the future of Australian sculpture can't be underplayed.

Until July 17, 2011

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