Melbourne artist Callum Morton, who has an abiding interest in modernist architecture, savored the opportunity to reimagine the back entrances of city buildings lining two hidden laneways in central Sydney. Thoroughly integrated despite being installed decades after the buildings’ completion, In Through the Out Door is a series of three mosaics that bring a sense of fun and wonder to these narrow back streets. Usually frequented by office workers, cleaners putting out the bins in the morning, and rough sleepers at night, the project serves to entice pedestrians on their way from Town Hall to the northern central business district or harborside. Curated by Barbara Flynn, the mosaics respond to iconic Sydney patterns and colours such as the 19th-century tiled floor of the nearby Queen Victoria Building, Sol LeWitt’s foyer mural in Harry Seidler’s Australia Square, the tile patterns of the Opera House shells, and the crown sitting above the Luna Park entrance. Transforming the laneways from peripheral transitory spaces to immersive works of art, Morton has elevated service and exit doorways to sitespecific portals of curiosity.
– Felicity Fenner, Chair, City of Sydney Public Art Advisory Panel
In Through the Out Door reimagines three rear doorways in city laneways on Market Row and Mullins Street, between Clarence and York streets. Through colour and pattern, the artworks play with the experience of people walking in the city, probing their unconscious memory of places across the city. The colour and patterns created by tiles and lighting seem to describe things that are strangely familiar. Transforming laneways once neglected and forgotten, each doorway echoes the familiar icons of other parts of the city, weaving everything together and reminding us that cities are never fully known.
Callum Morton is one of Australia’s most singular artists. In 2007 he represented Australia at the Venice Biennale by evoking his childhood home, designed and built in the 1970s in a modernist style by his architect father. Inspired by architecture, Morton’s works explore human interaction with the built environment and ideas of the city.
Morton has described the work in this way:
Following the situationist idea of the dérive or drift – a method of traversing unfamiliar pathways of the capitalist city to uncover its hidden ambiences – my aimless drifting imprinted a range of ideas and images on me. These included Sol Le Witt’s 360˚ mural in the foyer of Harry Seidler’s Australia Square, the crown sitting above the Luna Park face in Milsons Point, tile patterns from the exterior shells of the Opera House and the floor of the Queen Victoria Building.
Typically, laneways are located off the regular pedestrian pathways at the back of, or in between buildings. They are the place of fire escapes, service access and rubbish collection, workers taking breaks, out-of-the-way cafes, and the haunts of those among us who are homeless and looking for a temporary sanctuary to set up and sleep. In these spaces one can observe and engage with the unadorned fabric and life of the city in its day to day. Interjecting art doesn’t change anything or interrupt the routines of city dwellers, but it might spark our curiosity and reveal things we haven’t known about this place where we work and live.
Our expectations are turned on their head. Crisp modernist architectural detailing or a luxurious Victorian pattern of the Queen Victoria Building transposed to a neglected back door is surprising and encourages us to notice life around us and possibly see things differently. Maps and satellite views may have us believe that places are knowable, but these works of mine reaffirm that actually cities come in and out of view and constantly change, to be rediscovered anew.
City Art is the City of Sydney’s public art program and part of Sustainable Sydney 2030–2050 Continuing the Vision, and is guided by the city art strategy. The program identifies opportunities for public art that benefit our communities and celebrate the unique contribution artists make to cultural life and our built environment. In Through the Out Door is part of our city centre public art plan, curated by Barbara Flynn.