Monuments for Fishes – Barangaroo

The source objects are the point. A fishing float is a small, cheap, functional thing – a buoy that bobs on the surface to mark where a net or a line sits, handled by working fishers and thrown in a boat with everything else. Enlarging one to the height of a seven-storey building is the purest possible statement of what this entire catalogue does: take an ordinary object and change nothing except its size, and it becomes a monument.

Most Big Things do this without meaning to. This work does it deliberately and says so in its title. Monuments for Fishes proposes that the memorial is for the fish rather than the fishers – an inversion, on a harbour foreshore where commercial fishing has been replaced by finance towers and apartments.

The site sharpens it. Barangaroo is built on reclaimed industrial waterfront, named for a Cammeraygal woman who was herself a fisher, and the cove is metres from water that was worked for food for a very long time before it was worked for freight.

At 22.6 metres this is among the tallest objects in the catalogue – short of the Emerald easel, but far heavier than almost anything else here.

The artist is not named in the material available.