About Buoyansea

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I would like to share a little bit about how my work Buoyansea came to be..

My wife and I live near a tidal river and several years ago we had a major flood. When the river went down again, we went exploring and I found a buoy washed up in a pile of logs. As a sculptor, I instantly thought it had potential to become something totally groovy, and so I dragged it home. I walked past it for a few years, each time letting my imagination run wild, but nothing presented itself until I fell in love with octopi. I had sculpted several small scale octopus sculptures and noted the public’s very positive responses, especially one I constructed from copper and pennies titled “Octopenny”. This work in particular helped my decision to design a large scale outdoor octopus, which during a few early sketches I had my “A-ha!” moment….and the title Buoy-an-sea came to mind soon after. I entered it into a competition at Bermagui called Sculpture on the Edge, where I only won a crappy $500 encouragement award…clearly the judges had no taste (Joke!! Haha… you can never hedge your bets in the art world). Later I received a call from David McLachlan who works for the Batemen’s Bay chamber of Tourism, who had the idea to acquire the work for public display on the Batemans Bay foreshore. When he told me it would be the first work to kick off a future sculpture walk in the area, I felt humbled and gratified. I had already entered Buoyansea into Lakelight Sculpture Completion in Jindabyne, where It won the major prize of $10,000 (clearly the judges had great taste in good art, hahaha!!).

I would like to take this opportunity to thank David and his crew for their vision and generosity, I think without them the installation of Buoyansea as well as this exhibition and the future sculpture walk would never have occurred.