Heart of the Nation: Sydney 2000

FOR the past 79 years, a platoon of stone soldiers have cast their sombre gaze over anyone walking through the southern end of Hyde Park in Sydney.

Hyde park

FOR the past 79 years, a platoon of stone soldiers on the Anzac Memorial have cast their sombre gaze over anyone walking through the southern end of Hyde Park in Sydney.

For a few weeks last year, though, an altogether different type of presence loomed over passers-by: the moving images of three huge faces, projected into the trees.

Artist Craig Walsh conceived the work, Emergence, as a way to present alternative histories of a public space - alternative, that is, to the statues, monuments and plaques that tell a city's official story. Hyde Park has long been a focal point for protest and civic unrest, which he wanted to acknowledge. So he found three people who fitted the bill for his project - "ordinary citizens who, off their own bat, have made a strong commitment to social justice" - then took each of them into a studio and filmed their faces. He directed them to smile, to blink, to look around them, to close their eyes for a few minutes as if asleep; sometimes he told them to simply stare straight ahead as if in contemplation. The edited footage, looped and slowed down by a half, was projected into the trees and accompanied by a soundscape of whistled protest songs. The effect was haunting, magical.

"People would just stumble upon it and be seduced by these monumental presences," says Walsh, 47, who's based in Sydney and has an exhibition at the MCA next month. "I like the idea that the artwork is viewing the audience, too; they're engaged."

The face pictured here, by the way, belongs to Jenny Curtis, a friendly mother-of-three from the city's inner west. A landscape architect, she says the experience of becoming a parent opened her eyes to the looming crisis of climate change; it led her to co-found a vocal campaign group that's fighting to stop the coal industry and championing renewable energy. She took her kids to see Emergence. What was their reaction to seeing her giant face like that? "They were totally freaked out," she laughs.