This pin marks the Big Thing itself. If stopping, choose a safe and legal place nearby.
27.47241° S, 153.01866° E
FIELD GUIDE
The story
Nine spheres of fine spray stand on the water inside the Queensland Art Gallery, each one a dandelion seed head made of nothing but pressure and nozzles.
Robert Woodward designed them, and anyone who has stood in Kings Cross in Sydney already knows his work: he made the El Alamein Fountain, the most loved water sculpture in the country and the direct ancestor of these. Woodward spent a career on one problem – how to make water itself the sculpture rather than the thing filling a basin – and the dandelion form is his answer, a radial array of jets throwing a hollow globe of droplets that reads as solid from a distance and as mist up close.
They were installed in 1982, when the gallery opened its permanent home at South Brisbane, and they are integral to the building rather than added to it. The Watermall runs through the interior parallel to the Brisbane River outside, lit through hidden ceiling domes that filter the glare, and the water continues past the fountains out to the Sculpture Courtyard's reflection pond and waterfall. The dandelions sit at the hinge between inside and out.
The work is nine bronze heads with brass pipes, held in the ArtsWorks Queensland collection. Woodward died in 2010.
It is catalogued here as related rather than as a roadside Big Thing, which is the right call – this is established public art in a state gallery. But a nine-part water sculpture you can walk through is doing something no fibreglass fruit manages, and the spectacle is real.
Photograph
This is a photograph, shown separately from the illustration artwork.
Dandelion Fountains is a group of nine dandelion-shaped water sculptures in the Queensland Art Gallery Watermall and Sculpture Courtyard. The bronze-and-brass spray heads form spherical clouds of fine water evoking giant dandelion seed heads – established public art rather than a traditional roadside Big Thing, which is why it sits in the Related category.
ACCESS
The Dandelion Fountains are in the Queensland Art Gallery Sculpture Courtyard. For drivers, use the independently mapped underground Queensland Art Gallery / Museum Car Park via Stanley Place, then continue on foot; public transport and pedestrian access are also available.
