This pin marks the Big Thing itself. If stopping, choose a safe and legal place nearby.
Site-level location · 35.3436° S, 149.0853° E
FIELD GUIDE
The story
It looks like it is hanging. It is actually standing on legs made of frayed warp.
David Jensz's Culture Fragment was commissioned by the ACT Government in 2012 for a site next to the Albemarle Building in Woden, and the university record of the work gives its dimensions precisely: 570 by 460 by 360 centimetres. A five-point-seven-metre copper weaving that appears suspended while in fact supporting itself on the trailing ends of its own threads.
That structural joke is the whole piece. Weaving is a textile technique, and textiles hang – so a monumental woven form reads instinctively as suspended from something above. Making it stand on the loose warp threads at its base inverts the expectation without announcing it, and most people will never notice why the object looks slightly wrong in a way they cannot place.
Copper is the right material for that. It can be worked into a genuine weave at architectural scale while remaining rigid enough to carry load, and it weathers to a green patina over decades, so the work is slowly changing colour.
The title suggests a piece torn from something larger – a fragment of cloth, implying a whole that is not present. A five-metre scrap.
Jensz made a companion work, Fractal Weave, and artsACT treats the two together.
Woden Town Centre also carries Phil Price's eleven-metre kinetic Dinornis Maximus on Yarra Glen Drive, which makes this suburban centre unusually well served for serious contemporary sculpture.
Photograph
This is a photograph, shown separately from the illustration artwork.
artsACT describes David Jensz’s 2012 Culture Fragment as a large-scale woven copper work and companion to Fractal Weave, installed in Woden Town Centre.
ACCESS
Public town-centre artwork in Woden. Treat as a pedestrian/public-realm discovery; no attraction-specific vehicle destination is required.
