Sally Smart, Shadow Trees, 2014
Shadow Trees by South Australian artist, Sally Smart, was installed in 2014 at the new Buluk Park and library the junction of Bourke and Collins Streets in Victoria Harbour, Docklands. Shadow Trees is both site-specific and creates a landmark for the site.
The plasma cut steel silhouettes are assembled into two large trees in a place where there have been no trees for probably a century or more. There were once many trees in that once swampy area where the river meets the bay before the Europeans arrived and chopped them all down to make docks for their ships. Now all of the trees, some of the docks and most of the ships have gone. Oddly this is not the only sculptural tree in the Docklands, there is also John Kelly’s Cow Up a Tree.
Painted pink, purple, orange, red, white, grey and black, Smart’s trees don’t pretend to be natural. However, they do appear more natural than the rest of the contrived, designed artificial area.
Trees are naturally a great sculptural form, redolent in meaning but until recently it was impossible to make at an appropriate scale. Smart’s trees seem full of stories. “The cut-out painted silhouette elements and text are open to interpretation, drawing on references from the site’s history, biology, botany, habitation, movement and language,” says Smart.
Shadow Trees tie in with Sally Smart’s gallery art works, where trees are a recurring motif. This is most obvious in her large installation, Family Tree House (Shadows and Symptoms),1999–2002. The felt and canvas with collage elements have been translated into steel for the Shadow Trees.
The shadows of these two trees links them to the text in the bluestone paving. The text is a poem by writer and cultural historian, Maria Tumarkin especially commissioned for the location. Like many contemporary sculptures it features an integrated lighting system rather than lighting as a modern addition.
Shadow Trees works well making and marking the location of a park and the Library at The Dock. For more see Victoria Harbour News.
Mark Stoner, A River Runs Through It, 2011
The geometric rippling piles of brick and the organic rippling carved white marble rocks or waves are scattered across this large site. There is no front to this sculpture, no perfect vantage point; to see it you have to walk around it, seeing it only in part or as a process of exploration.
You even have to explore the site to find all of the blue explanatory text panels. I have brought all the text together in one quote.
“… this site is the intersection of two axes… one reflects the city grid and its built form, the other is the original flow of the site as traced by the river and the wind… … a collision of water, wind and sun… …a composition of sculptures that creates a landscape of spaces, materials and systems… …in acknowledging the flow and timelessness of the river we may imagine the primal site… ”
The ellipsis are all Stoner’s, he is obviously a fan of ellipsis.
Stoner has other public sculptures; at the Victoria Market a memorial to the previous graveyard and another sculpture on the Geelong foreshore. His work has a monumental heavy quality that has its foundations in the location.
Adrian Mauriks Silence, 2001–02
On the NewQuay Promenade in Docklands there thirteen of these curvy white biomorophic fibreglass resin sculptures. It is all very surreal, like alien lifeforms growing in the Docklands. Silence, 2001–02 by Melbourne based sculptor, Adrian Mauriks, who described it as “a series of forms arousing to the mind”. Silence is spread out across an area of 18.5 metres by 12.5 metres outside Arkley Tower. The white painted surface of the biomorphic blobs are coated an accumulation of black scuff marks from the shoes of people, mostly children, who climb on them. (For earlier public art by Mauriks in Richmond see my blog post WTF Corner.)
Black Mark 
What are your thoughts?