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Desiring Machine : [Monumental sculpture]

Desiring Machine was one of four permanent sculpture commissions by leading Australian artists including Callum Morton and James Angus for the innovative new Eastlink Motorway in Melbourne designed by leading architects Wood Marsh. The works were selected by a panel of Australian art and design experts including Dr Gerard Vaughn, the director of the National Gallery of Victoria. It had a production budget of over one million dollars. It has a daily audience of several tens of thousands of motorists.

Desiring Machine is 38 meters long and 9 meters high and wide, fabricated from galvanised steel. It looks like both a fallen tree and a piece of monumental machinery. It is characterised by a dense filigree inspired by Arts and Crafts ornamentation and is a critique of Western attitudes to art, decorative motifs and the natural world.

The originality was in the use of a floral border from a 19th century pattern book that was adapted to form the base unit of the modular system of this sculpture which is composed of three repeated modular units generated from the 'original' pattern. Desiring Machine's recursive plant-like structure unfolds from a single stem five units long that branches into four stems, three units long which in turn branches into nine stems, two units long and finally branches into sixteen stems, each one unit long.

Innovative engineering and fabrication techniques were deployed to transpose the original graphic pattern into large scale 3D units which were bolted together on site. I worked with leading landscape architects to ensure the site was landscaped so that the structure looked as if it was embedded in its context.