James Rogers read this poem about Sydney sculpture at Armando and Gemma’s lunch at Wollombi following the opening weekend of the Wollombi Sculpture Festival
James has kindly agreed that I present it here on the blog
Sydney Sculpture.
The bastard child of New York and London. Conceived in a gap year, in broad daylight, in clear view of the Harbour Bridge and Opera house, in the decrepit shed between the sandstone walls of the old gaol.
At first thought a runt, but with a steady diet of junk and bits of dogma, the infant took root. Co-parented by the dandies of Paddington and the grey beards of Glebe and Balmain, a stubborn youth became an influence. Answered back. Put us in our place. Smack bang in the middle of the inverted grandeur of the last place on earth you’d expect sculpture to bother with character.
Wanderer of the beaches, bays and inlets. Frequenter ofthe front bars and backrooms of the squares and broadways. The space between the heads, a gateway for a gossip and a rumour of a middle way. Sons of tradies, girls from the country boarding schools.Migrant kids and the daydreamers and disaffected from the plain of the comfortable suburbs, leveled before the pile of scrap and steeled against the brutal outbursts of the power tool.
The wide brown rust seemed to carry the language of willful determination, the whatever stuff lying around mumble in a ghostly dialect of factory vernacular and industrial sonority, questionable company to keep. Waiting for the show to start, a steel origin story where Bricolage is caught cheating at mass, Old mate from the jazz joint up on top of the Cross imparted that you’ve got to stay dangling above all that with the mess around. Don’t flatter the solo with pre-med. You can’t soften the blow; the bastard will only speak when you’re spoken to!
Unarguably physical!
A body of work! What to make of it. There must be hundreds if not thousands of efforts still standing testament to the survival of the mysterious lure of plastic space. Held to account with a shifting camaraderie of reflective exchange, going on for years, it forged on through the slippery ground of generational civil wars and squirmed at earnest entreaties to theory. Antagonized by the seeming successes of painting and the marketing of histrionics, the foundling exercised its native independence and saw through the churn of trending fabrications and manufactured relevance.
A wild colonial grown, Sydney Sculpture now accepts a senior’s card, and an overview of an enduring contribution with little to no equivalence in Australiana. Accepting it’s relegation to the paddock and park, as a consequence of its attitude and struggle,and in the wake of the wave of outdoor exhibitions that have swept across the sandstone bluffs, this is a respectable vantage point to watch the emergent breed new life and legitimacy into the inheritance of what’s been a difficult bastard.
James Rogers
August 2026