CDU artist in Australia’s largest outdoor exhibition

Charles Darwin University PhD candidate Lee Harrop has had a work of art selected for the high-profile outdoor Sculpture by the Sea Bondi exhibition in Sydney next year.

And a second work has been selected for the Sculpture Inside exhibition, usually held to coincide with the outdoor event.

Visual artist Lee Harrop said it was a delight to have the glass tower “Untitled – Help Yourself” accepted for Australia’s largest annual outdoor sculpture exhibition.

“It’s an enormous project and the biggest challenge of my career,” Lee said.

“The sculpture comprises 114 sheets of A4 sized glass of various thicknesses stacked on top of each other in a column. Each sheet has a word deeply etched into it that can be read from the top. The etchings make a pattern down the column when viewed from the side.”

Lee said that each word was associated with the theme “violence”.

“I’ve used a range of words from ‘assault’ to ‘wound’, most of which have double meanings, and which have been arranged in alphabetical order from top to bottom,” she said.

“Some sheets of glass are thicker than others, with words denoting more grievous acts of violence having been etched on to the thicker sheets of glass.”

The “canvas” for Lee’s second work (Sculpture Inside) is a geological core sample that had been discarded from a West Australian mine. It is now engraved with the words “Time Will Tell”.

It is one of two of Lee’s engraved core samples to find its way into a public exhibition this summer. The other, “Time Will Come For Us”, has been selected as a finalist in the Hahndorf Academy’s Heysen Prize for Landscape.

The Academy had invited artists to express their connection or concern for the Australian landscape and environment, and to pay homage to renowned landscape artist Hans Heysen.

Sculpture by the Sea Bondi: W: https://sculpturebythesea.com/

Heysen Prize for Landscape: W: http://hahndorfacademy.org.au/exhibitions-1/2020/12/12/heysen-prize-for-landscape-finalist-exhibition-2020