Sculpture

How to memorialise this?

Reduction

People Landscape Sculpture

A main intention was to memorialise Glebe Island. I wished to create a sense of the majesty that was once there, that had been completely flattened.

I came to the conclusion, following my research, that what might be appropriate is a visual reminder - a suggestion of what was there. To spur a question in the visitors to the park and passers by. Using industrial materials, the aim is to represent the landscape/human dialectic in sculptural form. Oxidised finished steel framing and steel wiring will hold lighting that outlines the original islands profile. By day it will be a jarring angular linear sculpture, by night a constellation of pearls lighting up a line of topography showing how the island once was.

Land Sculpture outlining original Island footprint

Not prominent - recessive and within the trees

A model was made to explore scale and interactions with paths across the headland

The Landscape/ Human Dialectic in sculpture form across the Island

Like a pearl diver who descends to the bottom of the sea, not to excavate the bottom and bring it to light, but to pry loose the rich and the strange, the pearls and the coral in the depths and carry them to the surface

Hannah Arendt on Walter Benjamin’s Method

Like the pearl diver, the landscape architect need not bring up the sea floor, rather bring to the surface the pearls - the rich and the strange. Our site is covered in pearls - fundamental assets - of infinite scale. Our effort need not be great. I argue that with small design interventions and strategic planting, the pearls of the site can be revealed to create a challenging but inspiring landscape and public domain. The intention was to use this final project as a means to explore my own questions regarding the landscape and identity, and what could be possible with a response to a landscape question that is grounded in a certain type of theory.

Landscape memorials need not be singular and distant from experience. If one was to incorporate existing historic forms and materials into a new landscape design, the past will be tangibly there for all to interpret, touch and understand.

We don’t need to put the past on plinths and describe what was once there - what was there is still there, and is part of an ongoing process of becoming and disintegration. It is quite popular to put aside a few key elements found on site to ‘represent’ the history of a space, and then clear the rest of the site in a violent transformation cutting off the site from its history and its previous physical form. Artifacts that were set aside are then used as mantle pieces to suggest what was there.

I believe this enters the realm of the tokenistic and opportunistic - a simple way to clear the slate, create a tabla rasa for a complete departure from the sites complex landscape dialectic.

Glebe Island is facing this problem. Most of the current speculative responses to redeveloping Glebe Island involve a radical redesign of what is there. Why can’t we keep what is there in the main? What is more meaningful than a site with complex layers of history - no matter how brutalist they appear? Ideas of sustainability and the restoration of ecologies were intended to go hand in hand with the themes of historical representation on site.

The jarring ideas of an industrial nowhere-land and a flourishing restored heath/dune ecosystem would be the perfect landscape contradiction to represent the previously described landscape dialectic. Such a style of intervention would naturally question our horrible history of the destruction of Glebe Island, but also offer a sense of redemption, in that we have the opportunity to re-adjust the meaning of the headland from industrial exploitation to natural reclamation.

Finally, the idea of social geography and Western Sydney’s access to spaces like this is a major design influence. The proposed Metro station at White Bay would open up the site directly to people of Western Sydney. I believe it should be an imperative to offer people with restricted access to beautiful places a direct, affordable, equitable access to the harbour and the chance to swim in a beautiful cove. Glebe Island, and the Bays precinct, offer Sydney a chance to convey something different to its residents. A sustainable, historically-aware and accessible harbour foreshore that is both conceptually challenging but also historically and naturally wild. A place that unavoidably represents our destructive relationship to the land post invasion, but also at the same time a proposition of redemption, where the same site of destruction reveals flourishing ecosystems - a sense of hope in what has been repeatedly described as a wasteland.

List of Referenced Figures

All other figures in this document are by the author. Base mapping from nearmap.com, GIS Data from NSW Government’s Clip and Ship Service.

1. Glebe Island: American & Australasian Photographic Company 1870, Glebe Island Bridge 2. Wheat Galleries Image of Bulk Wheat Galleries, State Library NSW 3. Glebe Island 1835 Mason, Walter G & Mason, Walter G. Australian picture pleasure book 1857, Glebe Island, Port Jackson, J.R. Clarke, [Sydney] 4. Detail of map ‘Shewing Main Wharfage of the Port of Sydney’ attained from the Port Authority of NSW - Dated at 1911 5. Detail of map ‘Shewing Main Wharfage of the Port of Sydney’ attained from the Port Authority of NSW - Dated at 1916 6. Detail of map ‘Shewing Main Wharfage of the Port of Sydney’ attained from the Port Authority of NSW - Dated at 1923 7. Detail of map ‘Shewing Main Wharfage of the Port of Sydney’ attained from the Port Authority of NSW - Dated at 1945 8. Portrait of cultural critic Svetlama Boym, accessed in November 2021 at https://media.newyorker.com/photos/59096f91ebe912338a376e0a/master/w_2794,h_1864,c_limit/Gessen-Postscript-Svetlana-Boym.jpg 9. Naval Base at Saint Nazaire https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Le_toit_de_la_base_sous-marine_(Saint-Nazaire)_ (7716934422).jpg accessed November 20121 10. Gilles Clement - Garden of the Third Landscape https://www.pca-stream.com/en/articles/gilles-clement-favoringthe-living-over-form-115 accessed November 20121 11. Detail of Illoura Reserve https://www.innerwest.nsw.gov.au/explore/parks-sport-and-recreation/parks-and-playgrounds/parks-by-suburb/balmain-parks/illoura-reserve accessed November 20121 12. Author’s own - Image of Pirrama Park wooden pylons 13. Detail of JMD’s Clifftop Walk at Cockatoo Island https://jmddesign.com.au/projects/cockatoo-island-clifftop/ accessed November 20121 14. Render of proposed Sydney Fishmarkets: https://www.sydneyfishmarket.com.au/Corporate/Redevelopment accessed November 20121 15. Aspect’s Darling Quarter: https://www.aspect-studios.com/au/project/darling-quarter accessed November 20121 16. Architectus’ speculative render of Glebe Island proposal: https://architectus.com.au/insight/bays-west-the-resilientcity/ accessed November 20121 17. Westconnex - https://www.westconnex.com.au/media/tfdma23p/image-80.jpg accessed November 20121 18. www.nearmap.com 19. Concrete Rubble - https://cf.specifyconcrete.org/img/IMG_8690.jpg accessed November 20121 20. Detail of engineering drawings, attained from the Port Authority of NSW 21. Detail of engineering drawings, attained from the Port Authority of NSW 22. Detail of engineering drawings, attained from the Port Authority of NSW 23. McGregor Coxall’s Ballast Point: https://mcgregorcoxall.com/project-detail/125 accessed November 20121 24. McGregor Coxall’s Ballast Point https://mcgregorcoxall.com/project-detail/125 accessed November 20121 References

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