I went up to Sydney last weekend to do another embroidery course at Mosman Needlecraft. I'm getting this down to a fine art - leave on Friday, catch the bus, stay the night, embroider during the day, homework during the evening, another day of embroidery and then ferry across the harbour and bus home. The children are old enough now to be left quite easily. In fact, I think they all enjoy the change of routine. While I'm away, the mood is probably a bit more relaxed and fewer vegetables are served with dinner. Got to love that! From my perspective, I've enjoyed being able to learn new embroidery skills, meet like minded people and enjoy being back in a big city.
I love visiting Sydney. I see things - great things. The harbour is magnificent. The shops are wonderful. There are shows we don't get in Canberra. I like keeping my big city skills alive - negotiating the rush, the people, the details, the roads but I have no desire to ever live in a big city again. I've been so long now in this beautiful, open, low-scale metropolis, I can't quite imagine ever being permanently located in those dark closed in spaces of a big city. It is not quite 4pm in the photo below on an autumn day. There is light up above the skyscrapers but not much left down on the street level. An hour later I was coming out of a needlepoint shop Morris & Sons, on York - so only 5pm and it was dark and cold and everyone was rushing to get home. I felt like Banjo Paterson. Though it probably didn't help that I was reading Dennis O'Keefe's new book about The secret history of Waltzing Matilda - the history of the song - where he describe how much Banjo hated his dreary legal job in the big city of Sydney.
Just around the corner from where I stay is this office building. I'm usually seeing it on a quiet Saturday morning when the office workers have long since caught the trains and buses back to their suburban homes, leaving the business district very quiet. It allows me time to enjoy the public art that this big corporation has installed in their business foyer. These diligent employees probably rush past it every day, as would I, if it was my office, thinking about the lists of things to do once they logged on. Isn't it interesting though? A huge styrofoam cup with threads connecting to another huge styrofoam cup. A playful piece of sculpture that puts a bit of a riff on communication. The installation is too large to get the whole thing into my viewfinder. Down the hill is the second Styrofoam cup.
And the threads connecting the two cups? The child's plaything and early science experiment where you speak down a piece of string. Well, the threads appear to be computer cabling from the internal workings of a modern piece of communication technology. This thread connecting to the other cup is a huge, two-humped tangle - perhaps representing the complexity of modern communication, the tangle of all our endless online messages, crossing and crossing across each machine.
At the entrance to this building, if you pause and look up, you'll notice quite an interestingly placed piece of Indigenous artwork. It looks good from many angles - which I like. I'm glad to see the big corporations using their massive profits to beautify and promote art.
As I walked further down the hill towards the train station, I found an existential message - pertinent to us all. Thanks Sydney transport for reminding me.
I'll show you the night photos in the next post. I was fortunate enough to overlap the Vivid festival. If you're local (and by that I mean anyone on the east coast of Australia...) you might like to hop a bit of transport and go take a look at the festival.