NOT like site - Post #6, artwork on the site

I haven't written much about the existing artworks on my "Not Like" site partly because I have had quite a bit of difficulty sourcing information, as there is no reference to the site or the works in any of the City of Yarra's public art documentation on their website. It is worth noting that their excellent documentation of other public art works in the City of Yarra collection.

I know they were created between 1993 to 1995 and are by more than one artist, though there is only a signage for two of them on the site.


This work is titled "Mother and Daughter" and was created by Mary Perrott Stimson between 1993-1994. There isn't a great deal of information available about the artist but the work is accompanied by a quotation that is inlaid on a bronze plate next to the work.

"Mother and Daughter walk proudly through history from the caves of ancient Africa, across continents, oceans and deserts - into Richmond."

The quote does provide some form of site specificity but I am completely baffled as to what it actually means or what significance it could have. I was thinking that perhaps it was a reference to indigenous history but that doesn't really sit properly on a number of levels.


This steel work is titled Opus 15 by artist Adrian Mauriks, who also has a number of other public art commissions in Melbourne. The work is 120 x 120 cm and was commissioned in 1995. The work is situation in the wall that used to be part of the tram house I mentioned in a previous post on the history of the site.

The works has some similar elements - cloven foot, the enclosed lotus shape, the wings and bird shape, "Buddha eye"- to those that appear in another work by the artist called Opus 10 created in 1994 for Commonwealth Bank for the World Trade Centre, George St, Sydney, NSW.

These elements the artist has discussed as being inspired by mythological inventions and the power these images have. His explanation of them includes "...you put all this together and you have what? Impossible to say, but it does give you access to a being process that is akin to an elevated state of consciousness where nothing is any longer, specific, but all is general, connected and inter twined, to everything else. It simply becomes a matter of being and occupying your own centre."


I can not find a reference to the title of this work or the artist that created it anywhere. On the base of the boat the "dog with the teeth" sits in is inscribed the words "Yarra" and "Acheron" which are both rivers. What they have to do with this particular work or site I can not determine. I know that a number of people, myself included, find the huge bared metal teeth of the dog quite disturbing and ominous.

Part of the reason I dislike this site so much is because the three works situated on it seem so completely detached not only from the physical location they are placed in but also from each other. They are all made of metal but don't have a cohesiveness they seem at odds with the environment they have been placed in. I have tried to rationalise with myself that they all perhaps explore some kind of mythology that I am unaware of but again it seems incredibly odd and "plonked" to do that on this particular site.

From a personal aesthetic take I find them all incredibly hard and unattractive so that they make an already unappealing site even harsher and less inviting without engaging with it at all.