LOUISE PARAMOR

Louise is best known for her sculptural arrangements of plastic objects, found objects and junk. Her experimentation with bright colours, volume and scale are explored in her over sized plastic sculptural elements when found on a freeway or in a landscape, or rearranged as small marquettes. 

At Mount Monument, Louise’s works sit at the top of the terraced landscape, and one at the end of the lake, overlooking the sculpture paddock, and strangely visible for passing traffic through the trees due to their bright colours and ridiculously playful forms.

At the her exhibition “Palace of the Republic” at the Ian Potter Gallery by the NGV, She has commented: ‘What makes these works distinctly of our time are the materials employed – industrial plastics, which are widely used in the manufacturing world. These plastics are especially tactile and often lurid in colour – characteristics which, not surprisingly, evoke an irresistible sense of play … I have embraced the physicality of this “stuff” to create dynamic, anthropomorphic works that also offer viewers an opportunity for reflection on our wider built environment’.

Louise lives and works in Melbourne, and her works have appeared in permanent collections and galleries all over Victoria, Perth WA and Germany.

NEIL TAYLOR

Neil Taylor is best known for his intricate sculptures that explore the essence of form, utilising, as he notes, “the laws of structure (to) reveal space as pure potential”. Taylor creates patterns of geometric shapes comprised of wire soldered together, or manipulated with pliers, rhythmically repeated to form complex three-dimensional objects. Working in both intimate and monumental scales, Taylor’s sculptures begin as meticulous sketches, later progressing to work that sits atop plinths, tables, suspended from wall or ceiling, or, as with his larger-scaled works, freestanding both indoors and out. In addition to wire, Taylor works with welded steel, papier-mâche and found objects, and has previously worked with animation.

Neil Taylor has been exhibiting regularly in Australia and overseas for over forty years and is the recipient of a number of sculpture prizes. He has completed a number of major commissions including sculptures for Heide Museum of Modern Art, Melbourne and Melbourne Art Fair. Neil Taylor currently lives and works in Melbourne.

‘Like the artist himself, the works speak with a gentle eloquence, prompting thoughts about the relationship between form and space, mass and volume, geometry and nature, line and structure. Not far below the geometry of their structure, however, they reveal (often in their titles) the artist's broader humanistic concerns such as the future of the natural environment and what it means to be human and conceptual. 

The sculptures are elegant, the eye paces along the metal lines at a slow and steady rate. There is a rhythm to the work that is meditative and engaging. But the works are not purely visual. They are metaphors and analogies for daily life.’ NIAGARA GALLERY, Sarah Thomas

Both of Neil’s works at Mount Monument are based on elegantly detailed marquettes’. As small works there is something ethereal and ambiguous about them, the connections and joints repetitive but elegant. Scaled up to more architectural proportions, they take on a more defined optical effect as viewed from different perspectives. Terry Karthaus the talented plumber who welded the works together over months during lockdown at the Unitised Building factory, intimately learning every connection, noted the sculptures change from complex chaos to the simplicity of systemic patterns depending on where he was on site after they had been installed.

Tom Borgas

Tom Borgas has a practice the extends across across multiple fields in parallel, including gallery shows, project-based installations, private commissions, performance, education, and temporary and permanent public art. Drawing on research that spans across a range of disciplines including architecture, geology, the politics of public space, philosophy and media theory, his process draws on the structures and optics of digital media but subverts these motifs as a means of fostering vibrantly connective, physical, analogue activations of art, culture and community.

Originally exhibited as a maquette at Stockroom Gallery in Kyneton, this work was developed as a fragment of the Active Forms series of works, shown as part of the inaugural Kyneton Contemporary Art Triennial in 2018. Conceived as a means of reframing the activity of its site, this work was initially constructed using 3D software where the objects were given the qualities of wooden sculptures and dropped into place using an animation process. This virtual event provided the basis for the fabrication and installation of the work’s existence in real life across two different sites in the township. 

As an architecturally scaled iteration of an original fragment, this sculpture stands as a lasting testament to an initially immaterial action. Its vibrant, Klein blue geometry provides a contrasting reference point for the shifting light and weather of the surrounding landscape.

Heather B Swann

Heather B Swann lives and works in Tasmania. She is currently working with Nonda Katsalidis on a sculptural piece to be exhibited in Teshima Island in Japan this year. She recently exhibited at Tarrawarra Gallery in the Yarra Valley, Victoria.

MAN BARROW FORKERS

Heather B Swann’s elegant and ephemeral Man Barrow Forkers seem to graze in the landscape like they are part of the mob of kangaroo. In her own words she describes these skeleton, linear ghost like sculptures;

 ‘…As well as the shape of the sky the long barrow shape makes a reference to agriculture - the man arched over the earth, forker hands digging in the soil - but also to a related theme in its tracing of the shape of prehistoric burial mounds.

Sometimes enormous heaps of earth and stones, but as often smaller and containing only one body, these mounds or barrows refer to a belief in the cyclical nature of life and death and fertilization. They are primal, like the omphalos, the navel of the world, the sacred stone in the sanctuary of Apollo at Delphi.

The sculptures resemble old and rusty tools found abandoned in a field or paddock, the use for which has long been forgotten. The simple shape recalls pre-mechanical farming practices - the plough pushed by man or pulled by horse - but also older agricultural acts; notably the belief that the ritualised sexual act was essential for the fruitfulness of the crop.

The Man Barrow Forkers are essentially curves in space: agricultural-sexual abstracts that are brand new shapes in the world, but at the same time so archetypal in reference as to be absolutely familiar. Night Creatures. I had begun. No stopping…

GATES OF HELL

The work was originally commissioned for the City of Melbourne’s Laneways public art program in 2007, and built into a wall at the Degraves Place entrance of the Flinders Street Station pedestrian underpass. After six months in situ, it was smashed up by Grand Final night revellers, but was subsequently reconstructed as an interior work, on commission from Karl Fender. In this, its third manifestation, Gates of Hell has been re-imagined and enlarged in collaboration with Nonda Katsalidis.

‘No one believes in heaven and hell anymore. Here on earth we have it all…’

• In Greek and Roman mythology, the multi-headed dog monster Cerberus protects the entrance of Hades, the underworld. Gates of Hell has its origin not only in this classical imagery, in the stories of Hercules and Orpheus, but also in the forms of French Romanesque sculpture, with its heraldic, symbolic and decorative beasts and its Last Judgement hell mouths.

More important than these cultural references, however, is the work's primitive emotion, its expression of angry threat. Cerberus's barking, biting heads are designed to frighten us out of our complacency and lethargy.  

• This sculpture represents the Gates of Hell.

The idea of the gate or door is suggested by the work’s quadrilateral frame. The lowness of the lintel increases the gravity of the space, drawing attention to ground level, hinting at a connection to a subterranean world. 

The work is a portrait of Cerberus, in Greek myth the monstrous hound who guards the entrance to Hades. Before convention and problems of visual representation limited him to three, Cerberus was held to have many heads. Framed by a recession in the wall, the sculpture comprises multiple dogs’ heads, a rearing, snarling pack rising from below the ground.

It is designed to surprise, thrill and chill, particularly on first encounter. It represents fear, both the artist's and the viewers', fear both in the particular and in the abstract.

Richard Stringer

Richard Stringer is a Melbourne based artist working across the fields of sculpture, painting and film. He has held thirteen solo exhibitions in Australia and has participated in exhibitions within Australia, New Zealand and Singapore, co-curated exhibitions at Gertrude Contemporary, Conical and Sculpture Square. He has received research funding from The Australia Council, Arts Victoria and The City of Melbourne, and has taken up residencies in Italy, New Zealand, Burkina Faso and Germany. His work is represented in the N.GV. and private collections in N.Z, Europe and North America. In 2017 he received first prize in the Deakin University Contemporary Small Sculpture Award. His public works include ‘Monument for a Public Building’ at the St Kilda Town Hall and ‘Queen Bee’ at Eureka Tower in Melbourne.This work was extended in 2019 to include the redesigned foyer of the building. He is currently finishing an adjoining work for the Fender Katsalidis designed, 2 Riverside Quay in Southbank.

Richard is currently on leave from a PhD at Monash University investigating the role of sculptures within cinema within the field of Media Archaeology. He received an Australian Postgraduate Award for this research.

He also works in Australia as a field archaeologist and since 2012 is a senior member of the Alampra Archaeological Mission in Cyprus.

The two works in the collection are separated by three years and are linked by theme. The Birth of Zarathustra (pop rivered tin,1990) sets out a dilemma where as Monument for a Public Building (Bronze,1993) goes on to depict its consequences.

These works attempt to locate the question, ’why are things as they are?’

BIRTH OF ZARATHUSTRA

Zarathustra is in some ways a simple ideogram. It is an imaginary depiction of the Iranian prophets ideology that divides the world in two. The floating figures each speak to the created opposites of good/evil, black/white, male/female, night/day, motion/stasis, dead/ alive.The character is now a divided self.

This dualistic worldview is fundamentally linked with the transition to urban life represented by brick built architecture. His head is tattooed with constructions, ziggurats, suburban houses and the Shot Tower in Melbourne.

MONUMENT FOR A PUBLIC BUILDING

Monument for a Public Building is what I imagine to be an appropriate public artwork within this context. It depicts the violence and confusion that this philosophic tradition creates for the people living within it. The inverted figure is a schizophrenia as the individual tries to understand the world with the ideological tools its given. The figure asks,‘to what extent are my thoughts my own? Does the logic system given to me by society limit me to finding answers? Could the questions it allows me to ask be itself the problem?’

Traditionally public works are driven by political or religious institutions. My interest in this area is that contemporary times allows the ideas of the individual citizen to be placed in the public domain.

In these two works I attempt to objectively engage the sociopolitical structure that paradoxically creates the conditions for me to make such things in the first place.

I hope these images represent all these dichotomies as a dark/comedy.

DEAD QUEEN BEE

The original Queen Bee sculpture was made in 2004.  Through the instigation of Nonda Katsalidis this work was later reimagined on a large scale for Eureka Tower in 2008.

The image of a Queen Bee standing on a building represents an insect/human interface though the styling of the building and the integration of human breasts. The intent of the work was to present architecture and ‘city life’ as a ‘colony’. This idea unifies those within it as part of a single system just as a bee hive itself becomes a composite entity. It touches on the entanglement between the origins of brick construction, centralised government, urban planning, and monumental sculpture.  

Many societies have by degrees adopted the bee as an ‘ideal’ for social organisation. This symbol is compelling as its beauty conjures order and productivity yet the ‘top down’ social model has issues for the individuals living within it.  The work is therefore cautionary regarding its sustainability as a human political system.

The Dead Queen commissioned by Mount Monument depicts both the consequences of this social order for people and its impact on the natural world at large, including the bee itself.

James Clayden

James is an artist whose practice encompasses sculpture, painting, theatre and film. He lives and works in Melbourne and has had a long friendship with Nonda which dates back to their first collaboration in Fitzroy in the early 80s.

James was commissioned to make a piece for the Cellar Door Room. His brief was simply to capture his impression of Mount Monument. His work is brooding, the density of trees or shadows appear as dark patches but highlighted with seemingly flat but vibrating colour of early morning light and space. Using a very limited palette of house paint, James has captured in his words ‘light and space’ and the broad range of colour and tone that varies so enormously between sunsets, sunrises and the Macedon weather. He seems to have begun with the physicality of Mount Monument and translated his feelings, impressions into an abstract piece, but there is a fleeting impression of the landscape itself.

 This is better described in by Adrian Martin for Blockproject 2020 exhibition of James’ work ” .. But what’s important is that his art can incite this game of fleeting projection and recognition. The fleetingness is what matters. The dissolution and rebirth of the trace. The loss of a a stable, consensus referent; but also the finding of a personal point. Just for a moment before it vanishes again. The complex translation that takes the artist down one path, and the spectator along another, around the same work. … The eternal mystery of the horizon; is it a thing, existing in itself, or just the interval between other things, land and sky, earth and clouds?  The horizon is the line that is not a line; yet what work it can do inside an image.”  BLOCKPROJECTS March 2020.  

As the weather patterns change and evolve in the Macedon Ranges, in part due to Climate Change, the energy of James’ work reflects on the energies and forces of environmental factors and how fragile the natural world is.

Lisa Roet

WHITE APE 2005 / BRONZE APE 2007

We first saw Lisa’s 2005 WHITE APE, which she won, at the McClelland Sculpture Prize. Nonda commissioned Lisa to re-cast the work in bronze at the Meridian foundry in Fitzroy IN 2007. The work has sat in front of our house at the base of Mount Monument for 15 years. Lisa is interested in the relationship between primates and humans and has spent a lot of time studying them in zoos and the wild including Borneo and exhibiting works based on her observations. Understanding how humans live, destroying habitats and the impact it is having on all primates. Her giant project to educate takes on many forms including sculpture, drawings, video work and jewellery, each medium showcasing her attention to detail in the texture of skin, the hair and the intricate detail of their features, how closely linked they are to humans but how vulnerable their habitats and futures really are.

We love the GORILLAZ (DEMON DAYS) song “Fire coming out of the Monkey’s Head”, and felt that a primates head was the perfect anchor for the base of a mountain, a space for the happy folk, defending the peace and quiet of such a special place in the Macedon Ranges.

Edan McCready

INFINITE CUBE 2018

Edan had conceptualised this little gem a decade before it was built in jewellery form. The infinite cube is reminiscent of Brancusi’s endless column; full of repetition and movement. As the cube’s interlock, seemingly on a precarious angle, floating out of the volcanic rock, they vibrate quietly between the western facing gums, overlooking the magical sunsets towards Hesket and Hanging Rock, capturing the light beautifully and blending magically into the trees and rock. Overlooking the grave of our much loved dog Stella, where she watches the kangaroos and dreams of chasing them though the grass. 

“A marquette was made for an old friend, but plans for the long form were forgotten. After the required number of moons had passed, the stars were finally permitted to align and I was given the chance to make this 2600kg piece of sacred space junk exist. With a lot of cursing and sweating and jigging and help from nice humans- she was born. An exploration of my fascination with skeletal forms and platonic solids, balanced on a lichen encrusted boulder in beautiful remnant eucalypt forest on a hill I’m quite fond of above the grave of an old comrade. I sure hope she likes it.”  Edan McCready

Gian Jian

MILITARY PARTY (1 & 2) 2000

Gian Jian is an artist with an international reputation for satirical and analytical qualities that question authority and government over reach. Following his experience as a propaganda poster artist in the People’s Liberation Army in China after enlisting in 1972, he has created a successful career as an artist in China, Australia, New Zealand, Mexico, Germany, France, Belgium, Sweden, Hong Kong and the USA. '

His work is featured in many prominent private and public collections all over the world. The two works shown at Mount Monument are both from an exhibition from 2000 at Ray Hughes Gallery in Surrey Hills, Sydney, entitled “The New Face of China”. It showed a  collection of contemporary Chinese artists who were all exploring the rapid period of modernisation and western influence in Beijing and China through the 1990’s. Guo Jian’s military experience altered his idealism and especially after the horror of the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre, changed his perspective on the role of the military and the Chinese government.

Both works are satirical pieces of debauchery and dissent by members of the military, karaoke and opium dens set the scene with faces that are in most part self portraits of Guo Jian and nameless women. This was in an interesting period to paint in China, a decade of liberal freedoms during the Hu Jintao years, examples of irreverent Chinese political art that is comfortable anywhere other than China. Gian Jian’s vibrant personality shines though in both works and most importantly in his words, shows that he is always laughing, with or without you.

NONDA KATSALIDIS

The large scale sculptural works included at Mount Monument are a collection Nonda completed during 2019-2022.

They begun as a series of reflections and models made from cork, card, timber, metal and wax, all evolving into Marquette’s of metal and timber of more detail. A period of time spent in the picturesque and tranquil Macedon Ranges, isolated like the rest of the world during the pandemic, Nonda used the time to explore architectural and sculptural ideas which his busy professional life did not allow.

Awarded a Queens Honours award in 2021 for his services to architectural and prefabricated building technology, many of the pieces explore connections, literally and metaphorically.

Spending time over the past 18 years watching the changes in seasons and weather at Mount Monument, exploring the bush, wetlands and the ancient volcanic outcrop, Nonda decided that the southern paddock, abandoned to self seed after cattle agistment was the perfect spot to place many of the works and connect them to the cellar door and restaurant. Prefabrication as a building technology is a process that requires an infinite exploration of connections for engineering and efficiency purposes.

Many of Nonda’s sculptures are a contrast of tectonics, repetitive components of either concrete, steel or timber that rest, interlock and explore connections to their broader context. Nonda often begins the design technique by beginning with a found object and responding to it intellectually or rationally, but it always an intuitive response that examines what feels right both materially, compositionally and proportionally.

The large concrete and steel piece, THRESHOLD that aligns with the cellar door entrance, has a room in Klein blue that frames the sky, within the threshold, providing a moment of reflection before crossing into the paddock of sculpture by Nonda and sculptors he has invited to contribute to this new experience.

The sculpture sitting at the top of the hill, CELESTIAL is a celebration of early industrial technologies and engineering feats of the 19th century. The hot rivet which is seen in this sculpture is the strongest type of rivet joint. As it cools it contracts and squeezes the joint tightly together. Nonda has lowered the beam to eye level, an appreciation of the common construction technique of the 19th century, including bridges, the Eiffel Tower and Levi jeans. The deep colour of the rust of the rivets and steel, creates a repetitive pattern and texture that is surprisingly ornamental, but seen from a distance, appears as an abstracted and strangely proportioned cross or a suspension bridge without it’s cables and connecting points.

The giant graphic red X, sited to the north of of the cross, is constructed from the same steel profile as a shipping container, rigid as a beam, it’s the tallest structure in the sculpture paddock reminiscent of OMA’S super graphics, and a hyper graphic seen through the trees as visitors drive past Mount Monument.

The works dotted around the terraced amphitheatre provide a layering of scale and context for a disused paddock including the two STACKS OF STICKS and NEMESIS.

What they all share is Nonda’s attraction to the rejected and redundant from the construction wasteland. Objects and pieces that have been recreated as industrial monuments, that take on temple-like, figurative or abstract qualities, they all re-imagine the inherent beauty and opportunity of waste. Once he no longer views them as junk, he sees them as shapes and forms to be rearranged. Whether the objects have been covered in pop rivets or rearranged in a different context to change their meaning like the giant AUGER with its top attached, referencing the simple and direct technology of a hand drill or ‘brace and bit’, the viewer may see something else entirely. In this case, it appears as a giant wine bottle opener.

The piece placed next to the wetlands, NOTCHED is a balanced stacking of giant timber logs that have been scorched with fire in the factory to create a blackened surface. Its name refers to the V shaped indentations that secures the sculpture together, a method of recording time or achievement. Re-imaging these objects as sculptures, they all naturally have the insight of his architectural and engineering sense of processes, but unlike his buildings, are simply reflections on tectonics and connections.