Making public art, Rule #1: All public artwork is awful.

If you start with the presumption that everyone is going to hate your public artwork it is imperative to default to making an artwork that you (the artist) are totally into. This is an artwork we have always wanted to make. One of our inspirations for the creation of this artwork was our pilgrimage to Miniatur Wunderland in Hamburg, Germany and the original Legoland in Billund, Sweden. These places feed the bonsai neural networks of the human brain- miniature worlds are offered for the mind to be immersed into, creating tiny narratives that you can briefly live within: a kind of mental holiday without the carbon footprint associated with the real thing.

These cerebral holidays are similar to the journeys that we undertake while reading books. Through the magic of print we can be transported to anyplace and anytime. Libraries are one of our favourite manmade places to be in and the library itself is the central subject within some of our favourite stories such as The Library of Babel by Borges.

The idea of the library as centre for knowledge and intrigue naturally led our minds to wander over to the Jonathan Swift’s floating island of Laputa in Gulliver’s Travels – a levitating island renowned for its mathematics and philosophy, where clothes do not fit properly due to all measurements being primarily made by quadrants and compasses rather than rulers.

Highlighting concepts of migration and cultural exchange, the plane is a floating island that features multiple geographic landscapes including mountains and plains as well as houses and people inhabiting the terrain.
As a place for learning and sharing, Cloud Nation emphasises the literary magic found in libraries.

Therefore instead of creating a public work that is, as the late Tom Wolfe put it: a ‘turd in the plaza’, we have created the flying turd in the plaza: a suspended airplane topped with HO scale dioramas floats within the two-storey void between the basement and first floor of the library tower. Visually, the artwork is a version of the classic ‘Ship in the bottle’. The over-sized plane hangs in an ungainly manner within the otherwise sublime library tower void. Pole-mounted monoculars have been installed around the outside perimeter of the tower providing curious onlookers the chance to magnify the dioramas on the plane.

The melding of this fantastic object with the daily life of the Green Square community is exciting. We hope that our suspended plane with its dramatic diorama will inspire a new generation of flâneurs.

Cloud Nation was commissioned by The City of Sydney