Stuart Highway Fence – Alice Springs

That design intent is the unusual part. Almost every object in this catalogue is meant to be seen from a standstill, or from a single glance out of a car window. A fence is a linear form that can only be read sequentially, which makes it closer to a film strip than a sculpture: the artwork happens over the duration of your passage rather than in one look.

It is also the correct form for the subject. The Stuart Highway is the spine of the continent, and Alice Springs sits at its midpoint. Representing a road as a line you travel beside is more honest than representing it as an object.

The incorporation of Indigenous art is recorded in the academic heritage documentation of the work. This entry does not attempt to describe or interpret that content; the artists and communities involved are not named in the material available, which is itself a gap worth closing.

Alice Springs holds several oversized objects – the Nevil Shute books at the library, the Big Hand outside the second-hand shop, the walk-through Yeperenye caterpillar at Araluen – and this is the longest of them by a considerable margin.