Gaye Jurisich
Crossing
2008
Plastic sheeting
If you think sculpture is all about bronze figures on stone plinths, artist Gaye Jurisich wants you to think again. Her Crossing at Brick Bay is a 300 metre long black and white plastic ‘road’. This ‘road’ snakes its way over farmland, under a lake, and disappears into a vineyard. Is this the longest zebra crossing in the world?
Gaye Jurisich has utilised large strips of black and white plastic to create this illusion of a giant pedestrian crossing. It’s undoubtedly visible from space and impossible to avoid from the ground; this is Jurisich’s intention. She wants people to stop in their tracks, to reconsider the landscape and the environment, to think about space, place and land use. Intervention or intrusion are both terms that help define her practice: scale and human significance are also descriptors. Crossing is about memory and interpretation. It encourages the viewer to look with fresh eyes at our landscape, examining ideas of departure, journeys and safe passages. Jurisich’s work also addresses expectation; our expectations about the arrangement and cultivation of space, and also our expectations about materials. She often takes something that people commonly see in one context and re-uses it in a new way. Hence the ‘displaced’ urban crossing.
Brick Bay’s Crossing can be seen in the continuum of the environmental installation work of Christo and Jeanne Claude, known for their wrapping of natural and urban features such as the Reichstag, the Pont Neuf in Paris and a 2.4km stretch of the Sydney coastline. Like much environmental art, Crossing is not destined to last - it is on show for three months at Brick Bay. Such temporary installation projects have been Jurisich’s focus in recent years, offering new interpretations of places and spaces that we often take for granted. The grassy slopes at Bronte beach in Sydney, Waiheke Island’s Connells Bay and part of the Hamilton Gardens have all been visited by Gaye Jurisich’s interventions.
Dr. Robin Woodward
