Spiral River weaves an enticing pattern through the Longyard
Spiral River. Image: Public Art Squad
An eye-catching terrazzo artwork has provided the community focal point in a prestigious new residential development in north-western NSW.
Described as a terrazzo plaza, Spiral River is the centrepiece of a town square within the Longyard Estate, at Tamworth.
The design, a spiralling river of cobalt blue terrazzo interspersed with fish, eels, tortoises and other native river life, is essentially an environmental statement about the importance of water within the landscape.
The Spiral River plaza connects with the tail of a Jamie Durie-designed water feature that drifts down the adjoining landscape to signify a river. Completing the cultural imprint and Durie’s extensive landscaping plan is a sculpture by Walcha artist, Stephen King.
Cleverly, the decision to adopt a spiral motif in the plaza enabled artist David Humphries, of Public Art Squad, to get ‘more bang for the buck’ by spreading the terrazzo over a broader area of the total space, rather than concentrating it in one smaller area.
The choice of aggregate size and colour was driven by Humphries’ desire to achieve an almost mosaic effect within the looser medium of terrazzo.
The integral terrazzo mix was a white cement with cobalt blue pigment and marble chips, poured into a mould over a 40mm ground slab. Once the mix was poured the artistic team sprinkled mainly white stones, together with some black and red, of various size and shape up to about 20mm onto the surface to give the design another level of mosaic effect.
A grey concrete mix, also sprinkled with mainly white stones and marble chips, was used to infill around the blue terrazzo pattern. Both the grey concrete and blue terrazzo were ground back to the desired finish simultaneously.
The fish, tortoises and other native life that feature within the terrazzo river were produced off-site at Public Art Squad’s Sydney studio.
“This gave us much more control over the process, enabling us to be quite decorative with the placement of stones and other materials that feature in those particular designs,” Humphries says.
“We took them up to the site pre-ground so that all we had to do was place them within the brass mould of the river ready for the terrazzo infill.”
These various design elements created in the studio were achieved using a similar terrazzo mix and sprinkling technique, with a variety of pigments used to derive different colours.
David Humphries maintains a large store of aggregates and marble off-cuts in his studio, mostly in the range of 10 to 20mm, that are used according to the call of each particular design he’s working on.
Humphries describes the ‘magic’ of the terrazzo medium as akin to slicing through a marble cake to reveal various random patterns of colour and shape.
“Although it’s essentially a controlled process there are a lot of things you can’t predict before you grind it back, and that’s one of the attractions,” he says.
“It’s a medium that allows you a lot of artistic flexibility. It’s almost like painting a big mural, whereas if you were trying to achieve the same thing with granite inlays, for example, you’d be much more restricted.
“We’re continually exploring different directions and design ideas, but they really only come about because we understand the medium.
“If you know what the concrete can do and how far you can take it, it gives you a lot of freedom.”
4-Jun-2008