Central Park

Central Park provides an incredible setting for some of Sydney’s most exciting public artworks. Art is the perfect stimulus for conversation and ideas, so Central Park will be a place where people come to be engaged, inspired and entertained. Its art collection will foster a connection between our city’s past, present and future, and reminds us that we belong to a legacy that is much larger than ourselves. Ultimately the most eye-catching artworks at Central Park will belong to its permanent collection, including Patrick Blanc’s living walls and Yann Kersale’s floating light display, which adorn the façades at One Central Park by Ateliers Jean Nouvel.

Guided by Sydney artists and art consultants Jennifer Turpin and Michaelie Crawford, Central Park’s public art collection will welcome curious Sydney-siders into an area that was hidden from public view for 150 years. Jennifer and Michaelie are now commissioning artworks that celebrate the alchemy, flux and distillation that once took place inside the old brewery that originally occupied Central Park. “The Public Art Strategy will elucidate the soul of Central Park’s past and give expression to the spirit of its future,” says Jennifer.

Central Park’s $8million Public Art collection will begin to appear on hoardings, walls and cranes over the coming months and years. 

First up: the Artists in Residence project. 'Artists In Residence' is a temporary public art project which will occupy the heritage brewery yard buildings and brick stack from April 2011. Brook Andrew, Mikala Dwyer, Claire Healy & Sean Cordeiro and Caroline Rothwell have been selected to create works specifically for this unusual and spectacularly visible site - just off Broadway, in the thick of Central Park's construction activity.

Each artist has been given free rein to create an artwork that will not only contribute to the creative character of the Chippendale community, but will also be inspired by what art advisor Michaelie Crawford describes as “the history, fluids, processes and intoxications of the site’s brewing past”. As each artist installs a new work, the previous works will remain – building to a playful collective ‘conversation’ between the four works. Watch the site from March, for some surprising transformations.

Curator’s introduction to Artists in Residence, by Anne Loxley | January 2011:

Artists In Residence is an ambitious temporary public art project specifically designed for the Frasers Property Central Park development during its construction. Throughout 2011 and 2012, a series of art works will be progressively installed on the historic brewery building.

Acclaimed public artists and art consultants Jennifer Turpin and Michaelie Crawford, who invited me to work as Artists in Residence curator, conceived the project. Turpin and Crawford’s intention was to transform the much-loved building through the curatorial conceit that it was gradually being occupied by a group of bold and imaginative residents who took hold of the building with arresting and mostly sculptural interventions.

From a competition involving seven artists, a group of Australia’s most highly regarded contemporary artists were selected, including Brook Andrew, whose work has been featured in numerous prestigious exhibitions both in Australia and internationally, and Mikala Dwyer, who in 2009 was the recipient of an Australia Council fellowship.

All of these artists are distinguished by innovative and memorable forays into the public domain, for example Brook Andrew’s Jumping Castle War Memorial exhibited at the 2010 Biennale of Sydney, and Mikala Dwyer’s permanent sculpture IOU (2004) at the Docklands, Melbourne.

Artists in Residence reflects on many aspects of the site’s character. Brook Andrew’s Local Memory, installed on the Broadway facing wall in April 2011, celebrates the local community in a monumental group portrait. Andrew will utilise the wall’s architectural remnants of two previous floors to arrange the eighteen large-scale photographs, which will each be framed in white neon. The artist describes the work as “three rows of six historical photographic portraits of people from the brewery site as a large-scale pulsating glowing wall of faces”.

Andrew will depict not only the workers but the brewery’s broader community: “I am interested in the workers, but also local residents, people who visited and drank at the pubs, kids who played in the area, even people who may have delivered or made other calls for various reasons at the brewery”.

In September 2011 Mikala Dwyer’s work, 'Windwatcher', a 10.5 metre brightly coloured windsock crowning the iconic 52 metre tall chimney will complement Local Memory. Dwyer describes her kinetic sculpture as “simple but profound”, a reminder not just of the sky but of the majestic force of the wind.

The artworks in Artists in Residence will not just intrigue and delight passers-by; they will allow pause to consider in myriad and open-ended ways, the history, nature and future of Central Park.