Bitumen Bones

The title is the key to it. Bitumen bones are roadkill – the animals that die on a highway and are left on it – and forest ravens are the birds that clean them up. Anyone who has driven Tasmanian roads at dawn knows both halves of that equation intimately; the island has an unusually high rate of roadkill and an unusually visible population of scavengers working it. A sculpture about ravens on a remote road is about what happens on that road.

Rammed earth is the other half of the argument, and an unusual material for public art. It is literally compacted soil, layered and exposed so the strata show – a wall made of the place it stands in, weathering slowly, with the black metal wings emerging from it.

The Gordon River Road runs west from the Derwent Valley into the World Heritage wilderness toward Strathgordon, and it is a long, empty, spectacular drive. The Western Wilds trail exists to give travellers reasons to stop along routes like that.

It is not a cheerful object, and it is a considerably more serious piece of work than the genre usually produces.

Rammed earth will also weather visibly over the coming decades, softening and streaking, while the steel wings will not. The work is designed to age unevenly, which is unusual and probably intended.