This pin marks the Big Thing itself. If stopping, choose a safe and legal place nearby.
Site-level location · 35.2265° S, 138.5696° E
FIELD GUIDE
The story
A ten-metre wine bottle built out of recycled corks is an unusually good joke about its own industry, and Wirra Wirra had one for six years.
The sculpture – properly titled Our Work of Art, though everyone called it the Big Church Block Bottle after the winery's best-known red – was created in 2010 for the Melbourne Food and Wine Festival, then relocated to Wirra Wirra in McLaren Vale for display.
The material is what lifts it. Corks are the offcut of the wine trade, produced in enormous numbers and thrown away without thought, and building a bottle from them makes the object a summary of the thing it depicts: the container assembled from its own closures. It also arrived at a moment when the industry was arguing about corks, as screwcaps took over in Australia and New Zealand, which gives a cork-built bottle in 2010 a faintly elegiac quality it may not have intended.
It came off show in 2016. Wirra Wirra is very much still operating – visitors take tours through the historic ironstone winery and Trott's Cellar and can ring the three-quarter-tonne Angelus Bell – so this is not a story about a business failing. The bottle simply stopped being displayed, and the catalogue records it as removed for that reason.
A festival commission that finds a permanent home is doing well; one that then quietly comes off show after six years is following the normal arc. Temporary sculpture usually stays temporary in the end, even when somebody gives it a paddock to stand in.
What became of the corks is not recorded.
Photograph
This is a photograph, shown separately from the illustration artwork.
The Big Church Block Bottle, also known as Our Work of Art, was a ten-metre wine-bottle sculpture made from recycled corks, formerly on display at Wirra Wirra winery in McLaren Vale.
ACCESS
Historical listing only. Do not navigate visitors to Wirra Wirra expecting to see the bottle.
