Blue Perspective – Southport

That acquisition route is worth noting. SWELL is an annual outdoor sculpture festival at Currumbin, and the vast majority of what appears in such events is dismantled and trucked away within weeks. A work bought out of a temporary exhibition into permanent public ownership is the art-world equivalent of the parade float that a town refuses to let go – the same instinct that kept Buffy the cane toad at Sarina and the Baxter shoe at its garden supplies yard, arriving by a completely different door.

The subject is right for the coast. A surfer girl on the Gold Coast needs no justification at all, and rendering her in a single flat blue removes any individual identity, leaving a form rather than a portrait.

Cox's other work in the same parklands, Maddie & Mike, was a direct 2010 council commission – so the artist has two pieces here that entered public ownership by opposite routes, one bought and one ordered.

Broadwater Parklands is the Southport foreshore's major public space, and the sculpture stands on open public ground rather than a commercial site.

The year of the work and its materials are not recorded here.