Reflective Lullaby – Giant Gnome

The freeway siting was the making of it. For years the gnome stood beside a motorway where a hundred thousand drivers a day passed it at speed, and it became one of the most recognised pieces of public art in Melbourne by sheer exposure – the kind of accidental fame that roadside Big Things achieve and gallery sculpture usually does not.

The material is the joke and the seriousness at once. A garden gnome is the definitive object of suburban kitsch, mass-produced, painted, faintly embarrassing. Rendering one in faceted mirror-polished steel puts it in the visual language of contemporary sculpture – Koons, reflective surfaces, the viewer implicated in the work – while keeping the subject resolutely daggy. It reflects the sky, the traffic and whoever is standing in front of it.

Being nicknamed Frankie, after Frankston, is the other half of the story: the public annexed a piece of art-world commissioning and made it a local mascot, which is precisely what happens to Big Things.

McClelland is a substantial sculpture park in bushland at Langwarrin, and the record marks access restricted because it operates with its own hours and conditions rather than as open roadside ground.

No source located gives its size and the decade it belongs to.