In a small little corner of Sydney’s Eastern Suburbs is a small little gallery exhibiting small little sculptures. Over the next month, Redleaf Gallery at Woollahra is presenting the finalists for their annual Small Sculpture Prize, an international mixed-media competition which has sculptures made across cultures, mediums, and sizes.
The scale is quite miniscule, considering no sculpture is allowed to exceed 80 cm in any dimension, which leads to some quite fascinating bases for the artworks: there’s a sock, with pumpkin seeds sown into the sock by Jaqueline Bradley as a demonstration of liminal capacity; Kendal Murray’s small ceramic sculpture is a whimsical tower of teacups that look deserving of a sunny beach day and limitless imagination; A concrete cube by Samantha Haničar crudely captures steel springs, and is at once intimidatingly claustrophobic and seemingly useless, as if a chunk had been taken out of an Eastern European prison.
What it lacks in size, the exhibit deeply makes up for in character. The fifty pieces, picked out from over six-hundred entries, are cloaked in personality, thought, and clear consideration for art as a medium. Every sculpture is a story, infused with the artist’s cultural sensibilities and personal history. I went at nighttime, and in glassy rooms overlooking the water the rooms feel tight and inquisitive, with artworks on pedestals, on walls, on floors, scattered around a small set of corridors which loop and feel infinite.
The dynamic displays make the small details feel more poignant. Brigid Vidler’s piece, a gorgeous coral sculpture constructed with jerry cans, salvaged denim, and recycled plastic, springs from the ground like a deformed beast of nature, as if a coral farm had been choked by the tonnes of fast fashion we dispose of every day.
A personal favourite was Blair Garland’s The Lantana McHappy Meal, a woollen depiction of a Happy Meal with a design based around the Lantana camara plant. Initially captivating for its delicate handiwork, the meal becomes disarming when you realise the Lantana camara is an invasive species brought to our shores by colonisers, and suddenly the tray of hollow containers becomes an epicentre of capitalist critique, discourse around accessibility vs. regulation of fast food, and the ways in which female labour (including cooking and sewing) is consistently underappreciated and scrutinised.
The winner of the prize, Anita Johnson’s Tenderness, was a smashed-up cricket ball reformed inside using possum fur and a wet leather cast of the artist’s breast. The ethos behind the piece is striking: in an object which could only be destroyed so cleanly through violence, there can be hope remade through the tender nurturing of delicate hands, through the love and hope which flows from the body and from nature.
The beauty of a showcase like this is the fact that details which are historically small and passive, of culture and background and gender and lineage, these are not inhibitors to art being prestigious or creative or meaningful: they are the exact features which fuse art to such purposeful displays of love, personhood, and tenderness.
The Woollahra Small Sculpture Prize is on exhibition at Woollahra Gallery at Redleaf from the 28th of September to November 5th. Entry is free.
