Touchdown – Giant Feather

Dawson is among New Zealand's most recognisable sculptors. The Chalice in Christchurch's Cathedral Square and the Ferns suspended above Wellington's Civic Square are both his, and both share the same method – large forms built from cut sheet that describe volume without filling it, so a structure that ought to be crushingly heavy reads as weightless.

A feather is the ideal subject for that approach. It is the standard shorthand for lightness, and rendering one in twenty-five tonnes of steel is a contradiction the work never resolves and does not need to.

The shape also appears on the property's front gate, so the sculpture and the entrance are deliberately linked.

The trail also carries Dawson's eighteen-metre Cumulus, the nine-metre kinetic Morpheus, a rainbow-painted 1908 railway bridge, a 7.3-metre park bench and the Ocean Pasture earthwork. The park opened for private bookings in late 2025.

Seeing Touchdown from the motorway is free. Getting close to it is by arrangement.