*Ficus Maris* by Ulan Murray and Rachel Burns

The coastal walk of Sculpture by the Sea from Bondi to Tamarama has become a rhythm I look forward to each year. No matter how many times I go, it still catches me off guard, that first meeting of the ocean, sandstone cliffs, salt in the air, and sculptures scattered as if the tide delivered them overnight. It draws crowds from far and wide, thousands walking the track with coffee in hand, phones ready, faces turned toward steel, stone, glass, timber, bronze. More than one hundred artists from eighteen countries this year. Some works are intimate and almost fragile, others monumental, built to withstand wind and time. Materials ranged from carved wood and shimmering glass to recycled netting and the enduring alchemy of bronze.

What I kept thinking, though, is how easy it is for the public to see only the surface of things. A polished sculpture on a cliff is a finished thought. People stop, take a photograph, and move on. But that object is not light. It carries months, often years, of quiet labour, financial stress, risk, failure, and the making of it again. You can see that only if you already know where to look.

Recently I was involved in commissioning two life-sized bronze works. The budget on paper looked reasonable. Manageable. Respectable. But after my first round of research into foundries, materials, mould-making, labour hours, patination, installation, transport, insurance, engineering reports, site preparation; it quickly became clear we were nowhere near what it would actually cost. Bronze, for all its permanence, is not just metal. It is people. It is fire. It is weeks of hands working on something you cannot rush.

It is in this frame of mind that I arrived at Bondi this year. And it is in this light that we first meet Tim Storrier’s The Splotcher, a weathered bronze figure standing over two metres tall, facing the sea as though it has been waiting too long for something to arrive. On his head, a tall red dunce cap with the word idiot scratched across it. In one hand he holds a brush and in the other a tin of paint, as if ready to make a brush stroke on the scenery front. He looks like somebody who tried and failed and is somehow still standing. And it is here you take your first photo because everybody does. It is the unofficial start of the walk. But then, if you pause long enough, you can feel the work bite a little. There is humour, yes, but behind that is the familiar ache of trying to make something in the world. The "calling of the artist", a mix of foolishness and persistence that accompanies every act of creation.

From there the path becomes an open-air treasure hunt. Sculptures lodged in rock crevices, balanced on cliff ledges, rising from sand or peeking through shrubs like small Easter eggs left for the observant. Some tower over the coastline, claiming the horizon. Others sit low and quiet, so subtle you almost miss them until you nearly step on them. That is the charm of this exhibition. Sculpture not confined to a white room. It is something you move around, walk past, circle back to. You feel the wind against it. You hear waves behind it. You smell salt and sunscreen and coffee. The elements become part of the sculpture, as necessary as its welds or castings.

And in that setting, you begin to notice how different artists think through material. There is the shimmering fragility of glass. The raw honesty of timber. The impossible lightness of steel when bent into movement. And bronze. Bronze holds a different weight. It carries history. It tells you time has been here.

Geraldo Zamproni’s Vital Threads is one of those pieces you can feel from a distance. A monumental needle, over fourteen feet tall, puncturing the rock near Marks Park as if stitching land and sea together. Made from resin, PVC and automotive paint, it catches the light like polished bone and chrome. The point of the needle disappears into stone. The eye of it leans toward the sky. But standing there, watching the ocean pulse behind it, it feels like an act of mending, binding, threading one thing into another. The body to place. The artwork to landscape.

Just beyond that, nestled closer to the ground, is Begrudgement by Canadian sculptor Ruth Abernethy. Two small bronze figures, grumpy and squat, as though they are reluctantly growing out of the earth like spiteful mushrooms. Their hair is cut in blunt bowl shapes. Their arms are crossed. Their expressions are pure resistance. They embody something so ordinary and human, the feeling of being unimpressed by the world, of having to endure it anyway. People laugh when they see them, then lean in, realising how finely they are modelled. There is a softness in their wrinkles. A weariness in the way they sit. Abernethy has always been good at finding quiet truth inside the body. Here, it is humour mixed with honesty, bronze made to feel like flesh.

And then there’s James Rogers’ Siren’s Song rises in arcs of steel that look drawn in mid-air. It feels impossible. Steel is not supposed to move like that. Yet here it sweeps and curls like a line of graphite swirling across paper. Rogers has spent decades working with steel, and it shows. This work has no stiffness in it. Only motion and lift, like a visual dance. And you can feel it, that the sculpture has the rhythm of wind and waves. You can almost hear it if you stop long enough. Rogers received the Aqualand Sculpture Award this year for this work, his twenty-first time exhibiting at Sculpture by the Sea since the very first one in 1997. It is an award that feels deserved. The work is not loud. It is not trying to impress. It is just finely made, deeply felt.

*Siren’s Song* by James Rogers, won the $70,000 Aqualand Sculpture Award

Not far from that is Drew McDonald’s SOMA, which breaks the seriousness with a kind of joyful absurdity. Two dolphins popping out of a stainless steel toaster. It sounds ridiculous until you see it, gleaming under the Bondi sun, perched on concrete and sandstone. It makes no sense and yet, somehow, it fits perfectly into the landscape. McDonald pulls from Dada, Surrealism and Pop Art. He takes the familiar, a toaster, a dolphin, and collides them together into something that loosens your logic for a moment. People laugh, but then they look again. The craftsmanship is precise. The stainless steel is polished and curved with care. It reminds me that sculpture does not always need to be profound. Sometimes it just needs to shift the way you see things, even for a second.

Then came Alien Arums by the Ghost Net Collective from Queensland, led by Lynnette Griffiths and Marion Gaemers. Bright, twisting forms made from discarded fishing nets, the ghost nets that wash ashore and trap marine life. They take these remnants of human waste and transform them into something alive, almost botanical. The structures coil and bloom like underwater plants or strange flowers from another world as they move to the sound of the ocean breeze. You can see every knot, every loop of thread pulled by hand. There is something deeply moving about that. Taking what harms the ocean and turning it into a tribute to its resilience. The work reminds you that sculpture is not always stone or metal. Sometimes it is fibre, colour, story and repair.

And yet, no matter how playful or poetic a sculpture is, I keep coming back to what it takes to make it. Especially bronze. Standing in front of Storrier’s figure, or Abernethy’s two squat beings, or any cast bronze work, I see not just the surface, but the whole unseen process behind it. Bronze sculpture does not begin in metal. It starts in clay or wax, shaped slowly by hand. The artist builds an armature, often steel or timber, to support the form. Layer by layer, the figure takes shape. When the clay stage is done, a mould is made, usually a rubber skin to capture every detail, then a rigid mother mould over that to hold it in shape.

Once the mould is removed, hot wax is poured into it, rotated and cooled until it forms a hollow shell, only a few millimetres thick. That wax replica is then cleaned, refined, every seam smoothed out. Sprues are attached, they are small wax rods that will later act as channels for molten bronze to flow in and air to escape. Then comes the ceramic shell. The wax figure is dipped into a slurry, then coated in fine sand. It dries. Then dipped again. Layer after layer until a thick ceramic skin covers it completely. This can take days.

Once dry, the whole piece goes into a kiln. The wax melts and drains away. Lost wax. In its place, a hollow ceramic mould remains. In another room, bronze is heated in a furnace to around 1150 degrees Celsius until it glows like the sun. It is poured carefully into the ceramic mould. It fills every cavity where the wax used to be. Then it cools. Hours later, the ceramic is broken apart. Bronze is revealed. But it is raw. Sprues are now solid bronze and must be cut away. Seams must be ground back. Welds made smooth. Details redefined by hand with chisels, grinders, files.

Then comes patination. The bronze is heated with a torch, and chemicals, ferric nitrate, liver of sulphur, cupric nitrate, are brushed or sprayed on. Colours bloom across the metal, from dark browns to greens and blacks. It is part science, part instinct. Once the right tone is achieved, wax is applied to seal the surface.

It takes a team to make a sculpture at the foundry. Not just the artists, but mould-makers, wax technicians, foundry workers, welders, patina specialists, riggers, crane operators, transport teams, installers. Each one an expert in a single part of the process.

So when I walk past a bronze figure on a cliff in Bondi, I do not just see a sculpture. I see that entire invisible chain of labour. And that changes how long I stand in front of it.

*Alien Arums* by the Ghost Net Collective

I keep coming back to Tim Storrier’s The Splotcher. People laugh and take photos, but if you stay with it, it starts to sink in. The gaited walk. The stupid hat with the word idiot scrawled across it. It speaks to that quiet humiliation you sometimes feel as an artist or as a person in general. You keep going anyway. You stand in the wind and push through it all.

And then I think about how people interact with sculpture here. Some rush past. Some pose. Some stand quietly, reading the plaque. Children climb on things they probably should not. The tide shifts. Sunlight moves. Salt dries on metal.

It is in these moments that sculpture feels most alive. Not sealed in a museum, but out here where it can be touched by weather, by time, by people who did not plan to see it that day.

This is what I love about Sculpture by the Sea. It celebrates the finished work, yet it also hints at everything hidden behind it. The risk of making. The cost. The heat of the foundry. The frustration of budgets that do not stretch far enough. The sleeplessness before a crane arrives. The quiet pride when the last weld is polished.

When I look back along the path, past the crowds and cliffs and sea, I realise this exhibition is not just about sculpture on a coastline. It is about patience. Persistence. The threads, vital threads, that tie one material to another, one hand to another, one idea to the land itself.

And that is perhaps the most powerful thing of all.

Sculpture by the Sea 2025: Between Ocean, Bronze and Labour

Cézanne to Giacometti: A Lineage of Rebellion and Reinvention National Gallery of Australia, Canberra