Need another reason to love the Metro? Here it is

Next time you’re moving through the south entrance of the new Victoria Cross metro station in North Sydney, look up and take note of the cinematic semicircle above your head.

If it is midday and summer, you might see the light in the video of bushland is harsh and directly above your head. If you’re passing by at sunset, in say, autumn, you will observe the video showing a gentle golden hour at 5pm. Late at night? You guessed it – look up as you sail down the escalators, and you might catch a full moon between the gum leaves.

What you’re looking at is Sundial, a video work by artists Indigo Hanlee and Michael Thomas Hill who spent two years in a patch of remnant bushland in North Sydney, recording the passing hours and seasons, which they then edited into a continuous year-long meditation on the natural world and the passing of time.

Sundial, a video work by artists Indigo Hanlee and Michael Thomas Hill.

Sundial is a clock, albeit not in the great railway tradition of timed departures and arrivals, and it is the slowest of slow entertainments, the perfect antidote to the rush of the daily commute. At 2080 hours, it might just be the longest movie ever made.

Sundial is also the result of the most substantial coordinated investment in public art seen in Australia, one of more than a dozen new and restored artworks along Sydney’s Metro City and Southwest rail line.

From Crows Nest on the lower north shore to Sydenham in the inner west, a tiny portion of the Metro’s considerable budget was, right at its inception, allocated to commissioning and installing artworks by Australian artists that tell a story of each place.

The NSW government has not revealed how much was invested in the public artworks but an educated estimate would put the figure at close to $20 million.

A rule of thumb is that new developments should allocate 1 per cent of their budget to public art but with the new Metro’s cost tipping $20 billion, the art investment is probably closer to .05 per cent.

UNSW professor Felicity Fenner, chair of the City of Sydney’s public art advisory panel and curatorial advisor to the Macquarie Group Collection says, “the new Sydney Metro has catapulted Sydney into the arena of proper grown-up cities”.

The iconic wall fountain made by Tom Bass was relocated to Martin Place Metro. Credit: Edwina Pickles

“The fact that public art is embedded into every one of the Metro stations further elevates our status within this international cohort.”

At the entries to the Crows Nest station, the understated nature of Esther Stewart’s ceramic installations evoke that area’s history as an industrial hub producing bricks and tiles for, among other things, Sydney’s iconic tiled pubs.

At Waterloo, cross-cultural artist Nicole Monks’ three-part installation Footprints on Gadigal Nura is a nod to the area’s past, present and future inhabitants.

At Central, artist Rose Nolan’s All Alongside of Each Other is a huge immersive text-sculpture and terrazzo floor embedded artwork near the northern entrance of the metro concourse designed to get commuters thinking about connections.

At Barangaroo, seven sculptures of trees fabricated from copper and steel are mounted on the eastern wall. Artist Khaled Sabsabi’s In Time We Shall is a testament to the original people of the Sydney Basin and the role of trees in nurturing life, culture and connection.

The explosion of public art is particularly concentrated around the new Martin Place Metro station, home to Sydney’s most impressive collection of public artworks outside the Art Gallery of NSW.

Metro artwork with two curators (Kati Westlake and Felicity Fenner) and an artist (Mikala Dwyer) with her work Continuum. Credit: Edwina Pickles

In her role with Macquarie Group, Fenner has for the past six years overseen the restoration and commissioning of more than half a dozen major artworks there. Macquarie Group developed the new Martin Place metro station. The financial group’s new headquarters are at 1 Elizabeth St, and in between there are layers of public thoroughfare with art on show.

There’s the refurbished 1962 Fountain, an iconic and once-visionary installation in the form of a snaking brass water feature by Australian sculptor Tom Bass that was salvaged before the demolition of the P&O Building, which formerly occupied the site.

Fountain found fame during the decades it was set into the building’s exterior wall, adjacent the footpath, but it now occupies an interior throughway.

Also from the same era, restored and re-hung are Douglas Annand’s ghoulish brass Four Continents and playful blue Ceramic Wall Mural.

Surry Hills born and Gamilaraay/Wonnarua and Yorta Yorta/Palawa artist Debra Beale’s artworks Ngalga Dy, Duba, Nura and Garrigarrang (Look Here, Ground, Country and Sea) are incorporated throughout the space, on floors, seating and wayfinding plinths.

Claire Healy and Sean Cordeiro’s immense wall sculpture The Magic Circle is influenced by complex city structures but also manages to evoke five interconnected boobs.

Sonic Luminescence by Tina Havelock Stevens in the Martin Place station. Credit: Steven Siewert

Numerous monumental works by Mikala Dwyer loom large over the entire space. Shelter of Hollows, hangs in greeting like a colourful open cracked walnut above the southern entry to the building, while a huge shiny silver mobius is suspended above the northern entry busily frequented by commuters heading for Metro escalators.

Dwyer’s companion piece to the mobius is a striking red and blue geometric mosaic with silver shapes suspended above it, greeting commuters entering the Metro from the southern end at 39 Martin Place.

The Melbourne artist is unfussed by the absence of reverence or active contemplation her works will receive from regular commuters rushing by. In fact she is quietly excited about the potential for her artworks to influence people subconsciously.

“This is exactly where art should be in the world,” she says.

As an artist, “you really have to consider the passage of time and the flow of people who, after a while won’t see the artwork but it will be within them”.

Connecting these two Metro exits is a tunnel walkway Muru Giligu, meaning path of light, where Tina Havelock Stevens and collaborators have created a Vivid-style experiential sound and light show Sonic Luminesence.

It’s a glorious thing to observe the reactions of commuters, such as the carefully dressed middle-aged woman in an aquamarine trench and orange crocs who strides along purposefully, only to pause and snap the rainbow neon, a smile hovering momentarily on her poker face.

Muru Giligu - meaning “Path of Light” - in the Martin Place Metro. Credit: Oscar Colman

A young couple holding hands, walk slowly, taking in the show, while others have snuggled into the wall bench that stretches the length of the tunnel to watch the whole experience.

In time, Sonic Luminescence will be replaced by a new site-specific work, and so on. It is possible to imagine corporate entertaining in the space (a dance party would be fun).

Kati Westlake, public art lead for the Sydney Metro project and a member of the curatorial committee that selected the Metro artworks from a call for expressions of interest, says the commitment to public art by Transport for NSW is not new.

“Art has been part of Sydney Metro since the beginning – for commuters it really adds to the experience and it’s intended to leave a legacy,” she says. “Customers register that someone cared enough to put (the artworks) there. It’s a fantastic symbol of our civil society.”

Among the new stations, Gadigal in the centre of the city is the showstopper, with its rolling curves lined with aluminium tubes that deaden noise, elevate light and take Australian subway design to another level.

At the Park St and Bathurst St entrances, artist Callum Morton’s gloriously coloured tiled murals evoke the rail tunnels and underground freshwater tank stream of historic Sydney.

“I wanted to do something that was beautiful, that made the experience for commuters an uplifting one, even if just for a moment,” Morton says. “The Underneath plays on a range of ideas but mostly it’s about colour and scale. I’m really pleased the community has embraced them.”

The investment in public art has helped make Sydney’s public transport more than a journey, but a destination unto itself.

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