“Clouds as large massive and angular forms.” Doesn’t it make you curious about the Cumulus Sculpture? It is a major visual marker for the newly completed Town Square of Rhodes in Sydney. It is a central artwork too.
The Cumulus Sculpture sits on key sight lines of Rhodes. It playfully imagines clouds as large, massive, and angular forms. These forms bump and coalesce into each other. Large, facetted, lightweight slabs float. They bump into one another. They coalesce to form a towering crisp formation. This is a reimagining of the spaces between clouds. The Cumulus Sculpture suggests a strange unitised modelling of cloud formation. Towering blocks are suspended overhead in seeming weightlessness.
Stuart Green, the artist, has always been interested in clouds. He often painted them as massive, weighty structures. They were not vapour-like wisps. Here, the work becomes a structure in actuality. Light plays across the Cumulus Sculpture. It reveals its facetted surfaces and larger tectonic moves.
The Cumulus Sculpture is primarily made from lightweight fibre-reinforced foam and resin. This allows the large forms to be cantilevered out into space. It requires very little support. Specialised engineering and fabrication methods were key to the sculpture’s success.
McDermott Baxter created the pale, delicate colours of sunrise. They also created a storm during the afternoon. They used rich tequila colours of sunset too. This was achieved using the then recently released media facade technology. Cumulus was the first suspended art installation piece in the world to adapt this new technology. It won the Illuminating Engineering Light Sculpture award for them. It was published in a worldwide survey of light art. It featured in Superlux: Smart Light Art, Design & Architecture for Cities. Thames & Hudson published this in 2015.
Davina Jackson, editor of Superlux: Smart Light Art, Design and Architecture for Cities, noted McDermott Baxter’s contribution. She considered it a notable contribution to the ‘smart light cities’ movement. This movement has galvanised public art, urban design and architecture. It has done this via electro luminescent systems of illumination. These systems are digitally controlled.
This inflated, colour-changing form represents a cloud. It is suspended above historic stone steps in central Sydney. It alludes to today’s challenges of reforming human destructions of natural environments. It also alludes to the globally dominant wireless networking paradigm of ‘cloud’ computing. This is a powerful message embodied in the Cumulus Sculpture. It stands as a testament to art, technology, and environmental consciousness.
So next time you are in Rhodes, Sydney, take a moment to look up. Admire the Cumulus Sculpture. Let it inspire you to think about the world around you.