Breezing in Canberra

Titanium alloy is the interesting choice. It is expensive, difficult to work and almost never used in public sculpture, but it has an exceptional strength-to-weight ratio, which is exactly what a kinetic work needs: elements light enough to be moved by ordinary wind, strong enough not to fatigue and fail after a decade of moving. Nishino has built a career on that material and that problem.

The National Arboretum is the right host. It was created on land burnt out in the catastrophic 2003 Canberra bushfires – a hundred forests of threatened and symbolic trees planted across the hills west of the city – and it is an exposed, windy, deliberately long-term place. A sculpture animated by wind, standing among young forests planted for the next century, is well matched to it.

Canberra is a city with a great deal of public art and a reputation, not entirely deserved, for taking itself seriously. This is one of the quieter pieces, and one of the more technically ambitious.

Kinetic works also demand something of the visitor that static ones do not: patience, and a willingness to come back on a different day. A calm afternoon shows you the object but not the artwork.