The Big Bread Clip

It was designed by Gary Deirmendjian and built with students from Dulwich High School, with teacher Shane Forrest overseeing the project, and unveiled in November 2018. That collaboration matters to how the piece reads. A commissioned sculptor working alone would probably not have chosen a bread clip; a room full of teenagers asked to nominate the most overlooked object in daily life very plausibly would.

It stands in Johnson Park in Dulwich Hill, beside the Arlington light-rail stop, which makes it one of the easiest Big Things in the country to reach without a car – a rarity in a catalogue built around highway travel. There is a hole through the centre, as there is on a real bread clip, and people put their heads through it for photographs.

By re-using an enormous quantity of a small plastic item that is otherwise thrown away without a thought, it also makes a quiet point about waste. It does not labour it.

There is a reason this object suits Sydney's inner west specifically. Dulwich Hill is a dense, diverse, terrace-and-flat suburb with limited open space, where public art has to work in small parks used hard by a lot of people. A sculpture built by local students out of a domestic throwaway is a much better fit for that setting than an imported bronze would be, and Johnson Park is a working neighbourhood park rather than a plaza.

The bread clip itself is a genuinely elegant piece of design – a single moulded shape, no moving parts, that grips a bag and releases it by hand. Enlarging it is a fair way of pointing that out.