|
| 12 February 2008 |
| Sculpture by the Sea |
Jarrod Taylor: Well, for the past 10 years, I've pretty much worked in construction, building scaffolding. It's a hard job, but as you can see, you always generally tend to end up working in your nicer places with good views, so it beats wearing a suit sometimes. You know, that's just the day job. And after work, I get to go home and work on my sculpture and my drawing, which is what I really find...where my passion is. I'd love to be an artist full-time and be able to do it... I think everybody would like to be able to do what they love for a job. Last year I had a huge break. I was accepted into Sculpture by the Sea at Bondi. I did my first major work - it was called the 'Structural Wave'. David Handley: 'Structural Wave', that Jarrod did last year, was the first major work that he'd done. No-one had heard about him before in the visual arts in Australia. And there it was - a 9m-high wave made out of scaffolding on the South Bondi headland, images of it going all around the world. The 'Wave' was extraordinarily special. For him to do better than that is going to be quite sensational. Jarrod Taylor: David gave me the Director's Prize for the 'Wave', which means I get an automatic entry into this year's Sculpture by the Sea. David also made me a part of a mentoring program worth about nine grand. David Handley: That gives you some funding to bring on someone to help you, advise you on certain things, whatever it might be - career or engineering - and also some money towards the work. I know yours is going to cost a bucketload more and so you're going to have to find some more, but it's a start. Jarrod Taylor: Oh, wow, fantastic. I can't believe the opportunities that are coming up through this. This is a fantastic opportunity. It's just letting my brain, like, run wild at the moment. I can't wait to kind of sit down and have bit of a think about who I'd like to bring in to become my mentor. I've got 10 months to create a new sculpture. But what? Generally my work is site-oriented. It does play on what's available to me. I try and get a feel for what's going to come out of the place, but there's lot to gather from just walking around a place. You can get a feeling for what you can and can't do. The idea...I think this one would be, like, maybe to do a barrel section, something that has to go over the handrail to a height so that people can walk through it and actually be walking in amongst the wave. Well, I think here would be kind of an idea of maybe a bit of a waterfall kind of coming down the hill, pitching off the rock and kind of exploding as it hits the ground. Yeah, I can see it here. I can definitely see it. I can see a big bit of wind. I can feel the wind. I see a big tornado. Everything I do is basically about a curve, and obviously working with such straight lines all the time, and the scaffold being just a rigid form, it's nice to exploit it in a different way and seeing it being used as a different medium, I think. They've given us 2.5 days to actually build it in on site. We stood up the structure, which went up very easily, built up the system scaffold, which again went up quite quickly. But now we're waiting on gear from my gear supplier. They sent it to the wrong place - down in Melbourne rather than Sydney. So we're just waiting on them. So that pretty much dictates when we're gonna finish it. The spacing of the scaffold placed on here is controlled by how much materials we have. We probably would have had them a little bit closer. Until that truck arrives, it's basically wait, stand by and try and do as much as we can. Finally. About time. I'm feeling a little bit better now I know that three-quarters of the sculpture just arrived. Oh, amazing, mate. To see it finished is just a great feeling. Yeah, it's taken so many months getting it here and to achieve what we were kind of after. Yeah, we're pretty happy with it, I think. It's been a good effort. David Handley: I knew he'd pull it off. Good luck to him, you know. What a huge job. The work itself - fantastic. It's gonna be a standout in the exhibition. Hopefully it will get Jarrod sort of impetus for his career. In terms of getting it to here - unreal. Jarrod Taylor: I think that it's about making sure you include passion into what you are doing. If you have passion, then you will always achieve what you set out to do. |
