This pin marks the Big Thing itself. If stopping, choose a safe and legal place nearby.
35.28134° S, 149.13054° E
FIELD GUIDE
The story
Two woven curved forms in copper piping, on a granite plinth, outside the Canberra Theatre.
David Jensz made Fractal Weave in 2006, and artsACT identifies it as his first large-scale woven copper public artwork for Canberra – the piece that established the method he would later use for Culture Fragment at Woden in 2012.
The description attached to it is more ambitious than the object lets on: a physical and symbolic manifestation of the interrelated aspects of our diverse culture and heritage. Weaving as a metaphor for a society is not a new idea, but making it in copper pipe at architectural scale is an unusual way to argue it, because the technique is genuinely woven rather than merely patterned. Individual lengths pass over and under each other and the structure holds because of that interlocking, not because of a frame.
Copper piping is also a very deliberate material choice. It is plumbing – the most utilitarian metal in a building – and using it for a work about culture and heritage puts something ordinary and infrastructural at the centre of the argument.
Civic Square is Canberra's central civic space, holding the theatre, the library and the Legislative Assembly, along with Tom Bass's Ethos, the first public artwork ever commissioned for the city.
So the square carries the beginning of Canberra's public art collection and one of its more technically interesting later additions, a few metres apart.
The record does not carry any figures for its size.
Photograph
This is a photograph, shown separately from the illustration artwork.
