This pin marks the Big Thing itself. If stopping, choose a safe and legal place nearby.
Site-level location · 37.8153° S, 144.9477° E
FIELD GUIDE
The story
Emily Floyd's giant black rabbit is called Signature Work, which is a joke about being an artist's signature piece.
The City of Melbourne's collection records it as commissioned in 2004 for Waterview Walk in Docklands, measuring 382 by 256 by 164 centimetres – so just under four metres – in black aluminium, and the city describes it plainly as a giant rabbit.
Floyd is among Australia's more significant contemporary sculptors, and her work consistently uses recognisable, almost toy-like forms rendered at monumental scale in flat colour. The rabbit reads as a child's silhouette blown up until it dominates a waterfront.
The subject carries weight in Australia that it does not elsewhere. Rabbits were introduced in 1859, reached plague numbers within decades, and did more damage to Australian agriculture and native ecology than any other introduced animal. A giant black rabbit in a public square is either a playful shape or a rather dark national joke, and the work does not resolve which.
Docklands is the right place for it. The precinct was developed from the late 1990s on former port land and had no accumulated identity at all, so its public art programme was doing what developer-commissioned art always does – manufacturing character for somewhere that had none. The area also holds Michael Snape's Continuum from 2005 and structures from MPavilion, Australia's leading architecture and design event.
Melbourne's other giant rabbit-adjacent object is the pink-and-white one burrowing into a hillside at Rotorua, on the other side of the Tasman.
Photograph
This is a photograph, shown separately from the illustration artwork.
City of Melbourne’s collection confirms Signature Work was commissioned in 2004 and remains located at Waterview Walk, Docklands. The work measures 382 × 256 × 164 cm and is explicitly described by the city as a giant rabbit.
ACCESS
Pedestrian/public-realm attraction. No vehicle destination is required; approach on foot from the surrounding public realm.
