Burnie Gateway – Welcome Gesture

Gateway artworks are their own genre and a demanding one. The brief is to mark a boundary that does not physically exist, be legible at highway speed, work from one direction more than the other, and say something about the place without resorting to a slogan. Most towns answer it with a sign and a flowerbed.

An abstract sweep of poles is a more confident answer. It has no subject to get wrong, it reads as motion rather than as an object, and the gesture – a raised arm, a wave – is understood without explanation.

Yellow is doing practical work. Burnie sits on the north-west coast where the weather comes off Bass Strait grey for much of the year, and a saturated warm colour against that is visible in conditions that would swallow most palettes.

Burnie has an unusually well-developed relationship with its oversized objects generally. The city council maintains a regional Big Things guide that is the reason a considerable number of north-west Tasmanian records in this catalogue have any official confirmation – the chainsaw, the pencils, the globe at Ulverstone, the platypus at Latrobe, the Big Penguin, the truffle dog at Deloraine.

Nothing available settles any date at all and any figures for its size.