Signatures return in new Elizabeth Quay artwork
The Government believes a new artwork comprising the signatures of WA schoolchildren at the Bell Tower will be more permanent than their original form, which had to be ripped up to make way for the Elizabeth Quay development.
Arts Minister John Day today unveiled a distinctive, ringed copper sculpture made up of hundreds of plates inscribed with signatures of 200,000 WA children who were in school in 1999, to be installed from April.
Conceived by WA artists Simon Gauntlett and Matthew Ngui, the $450,000 public artwork will have panels at either end which using optic fibre to pass images between each other, so a person walking past one would appear as a shadow on the other.
Mr Gauntlett said the shape could be interpreted as a “signature ring”, while Mr Ngui said the sculpture did not need to be seen as “something” at all.
But they let slip a mutual friend had observed it looked like a set of headphones, which could end up catching on among West Australians notorious for attaching irreverent monikers to public art.
The 200,000 signatures were originally inscribed into paving in 2000 to mark the opening of the Bell Tower, but the tiles had to be ripped up as part of development works for Elizabeth Quay last March.
Examples of the signatures on the Elizabeth Quay artwork.
After an outcry, it was realised the original signatures had been saved on disk and could form part of a new artwork.
Mr Day said he was confident the new incarnation of the signatures would satisfy those upset when the tiles were destroyed.
“There is going to be a re-creation and in my view probably a more permanent representation of these signatures which were there previously,” he said.
Mr Gauntlett said 32,000 optic fibres, which would be 426 km if laid end to end, were being threaded through the “ring” to achieve the image-transfer effect.
Arts Minister John Day unveils new students' signature artwork with artists Simon Gauntlett & Matthew Ngui. Picture: Daniel Emerson
“The central part of the concept is all about time passing, so one of the ways we are trying to represent that is to have light in a sense physically travelling from one panel to the other,” Mr Ngui said.
“As the light travels round it sort of touches the signatures on the copper panels.”
Mr Gauntlett said the artwork would sit on gravel to deter skateboarders from using it as an obstacle.
The sculpture is untitled at the moment.
