Roof for stray thoughts, 2022
Coated steel, mirror polished stainless steel
5 × 30 × 55m; 88 metric tonnes
LocationQuay Quarter Tower, 50 Bridge Street, Sydney
CommissionerAMP Capital
Architects 3XN, Studio Bright, Silvester Fuller, SJB
CuratorBarbara Flynn, Art Advisor
Award Property Council of Australia Innovation & Excellence Awards,
Award for Best Public Art Project 2023
PhotographyAdam Mork
Downloads
A passion for breakdancing as a teenager is intriguing and seems to link to the kind of art he would go on to make. With his three-man troupe, Harlem Gun Crew, Eliasson won the Scandinavian breakdancing championships in 1984. Could the art form have taught him how to judge his own body, and how people move in space, and was that a kind of perceptual training for the works to come?
He experimented with light installations as a student at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts in Copenhagen in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Then, as now, he would often recreate something he had witnessed firsthand, without hiding how it was done: ‘You see the hose pipe, the spotlight, the things creating the rainbow even as you see the rainbow.’ You are not just having an experience; you are also conscious of having that experience. Eliasson’s art encourages people to be self-aware and adventurous – as he was himself, putting it all on the line with the artwork that made him known to the world: The Weather Project, created for the Tate’s Turbine Hall in 2003. Using the most rudimentary materials, he created an effect of wonder that dazzled millions.
Titled Roof for stray thoughts, the artwork by Eliasson for Quay Quarter Sydney (QQS) exists in dialogue with the Sydney Harbour Bridge, and the two form a triangle with Sydney’s other icon, the Sydney Opera House. The relationship underscores the importance of the artwork as a component of the City of Sydney’s urban design objective to revitalise the northern part of the city at Circular Quay, and to connect it to the other two main squares, Town Hall Square and Central Station. The sculpture contributes a new icon to Sydney and creates a welcoming place for people to meet. It sends tendrils out that are visible from afar and alert passers-by to its presence.
What’s it like to experience this work? The ‘roof’ of the title locates it and immediately conjures a picture in the mind of its perch up high. ‘Stray’ gives us licence to roam, relax and reflect, perhaps while observing the fall of sunlight across the work as it creates a changing shadow play throughout the day. The form of the sculpture is intriguing – as the eye meanders across its surface, it can appear to keep growing. An earlier concept took a species of coral that lives in nearby Sydney Harbour as its inspiration. A feeling of being immersed in an all-encompassing environment is retained in the final work, just not an underwater one. Instead, in its final iteration, a living tree is the model, but the reference is poetic and approximate, never slavish. ‘Thoughts’ – the artist seems inclined to elicit a feeling of indeterminacy that will keep us guessing and thinking about what we have just experienced. Eliasson’s is art that will spur thought or even changes in our relationship to our surroundings: ‘He was interested in the connection between an experience that might take place … and the way it might affect your behaviour when you leave … in relation to the world around you.’