This pin marks the Big Thing itself. If stopping, choose a safe and legal place nearby.
Site-level location · 34.9228° S, 138.6026° E
FIELD GUIDE
The story
A two-metre mirrored pigeon in the middle of Rundle Mall, and the mirror is the whole idea.
Paul Sloan made Pigeon, installed in 2020 in Gawler Place, crafted from mirrored stainless steel and standing over two metres tall. Sloan is a nationally and internationally recognised South Australian artist, and the work has become one of Adelaide's most photographed pieces of public art.
The choice of subject is a deliberate provocation. Pigeons are the animal cities try to get rid of – dismissed as vermin, associated with mess, universally present and universally overlooked. Monumentalising one in polished steel in the state's principal shopping street inverts that completely.
The mirrored finish then does something a matt sculpture could not. The bird reflects the mall, the shopfronts and the people around it, so the object that is normally invisible becomes the thing everything else appears inside. Anyone photographing it photographs themselves.
Rundle Mall has form for this. The Mall's Balls have been the city's meeting point since 1977, and A Day Out – the four bronze pigs – has been drawing the same treatment since 1999. Adelaide has quietly built one of the strongest collections of well-loved, touchable, unpretentious public art in the country, and the pigeon is the newest addition to it.
South Australia Tourism and Rundle Mall both promote the sculpture, and it stands outside Nespresso in Gawler Place.
Nobody wrote down the name of whoever built it.
Photograph
This is a photograph, shown separately from the illustration artwork.
Rundle Mall and South Australia Tourism currently promote the sculpture in Gawler Place outside Nespresso. Installed in 2020, the work stands over two metres tall and has become a prominent city public-art landmark.
ACCESS
Pigeon stands in the pedestrian-only Rundle Mall at Gawler Place. For vehicle arrival, use UPark Gawler at 9–17 Gawler Place and walk roughly 140 metres to the sculpture; do not attempt to drive into the mall.
