Big Blue – Scone

The material is the whole idea. Baling twine is agricultural waste – the synthetic string that holds hay bales together, accumulating in every farm shed in the country, useless and not readily recycled. Building a horse from it is both a comment on farming and a genuinely difficult sculptural exercise, because twine has no structural rigidity and every form has to be found rather than carved.

Walk-through is the other unusual quality. Nearly every object in this catalogue is solid and meant to be photographed from outside. A sculpture you enter is doing something closer to installation art, and the blue of the twine seen from within would be a completely different experience from the one visible in a photograph.

Scone calls itself the horse capital of Australia and has the thoroughbred breeding industry to support it, so a horse is the obvious subject. Choosing a draught horse instead of a racehorse is the interesting deviation – the working animal that built the district rather than the valuable one that markets it now.

The siting is odder. Hunter Warbirds is an aviation museum, and a twine horse in an aircraft collection is an unexplained juxtaposition that the sources do not account for.

No answer exists for the year.