I don’t want to cast aspersions on the many, many bronze statues of indistinct humanoid shapes that litter public spaces throughout the world, but public art is not always the greatest. This might sound hard to believe, but bureaucracy is maybe not the best engine from which to elicit bold, exciting artistic choices.
If you said to me “train station art“, I would immediately picture a terrible mural of all the most beige local attractions, but whoever was in charge of brightening up Wynyard Station did a bloody bang-up job this time.
The station said goodbye to their iconic wooden escalators earlier in the year, possibly in exchange for something more along the lines of what escalators are made out of, but some of them (244, specifically) have made a return, in the form of the kind of abstract art piece that someone on shrooms would lose easily 45 minutes to.
According to the Sydney Morning Herald, the piece took local Sydney artist Chris Fox six months to design and twelve weeks to weld together. He (deservedly) seems pretty stoked about the piece:
Interloop is a project that really talks about past journeys and future journeys – this idea of two stitching stairways that interloop over each other using these heritage treads.
It is a major project to pull off in such a high-profile location. This is so visible – it’s fantastic.
All together, the mammoth work of art weighs over five tons and is stitched together with over a kilometre of welding, and I can only imagine how much of a pain in the ass it was to get the thing inside.
You can either wait to see what it looks like when you next catch the train into the city, or you could have a look at the photos below. Up to you, really.
We’re excited to reveal a new heritage-inspired artwork at Wynyard Station. The sculpture uses 244 treads from the iconic wooden escalators that were upgraded this year. 👌👷 👷♀️ pic.twitter.com/Cg8Xd95yDB
— Transport for NSW (@TransportforNSW) December 4, 2017
