Sculptures by the Sea - 107 sculptures from 7 countries on display at Australia's largest annual outdoor free exhibition

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Every year, peculiar apparitions appear on the cliffs between popular Sydney beaches Bondi and Tamarama, yet not even the gulls take fright at the annual Sculpture by the Sea exhibition - Australia's largest annual outdoor free exhibition of sculpture. This year, more than 100 sculptures from seven countries, including Japan, the US, Iceland and New Caledonia, are on display on the cliff tops or around the rocky foreshore, expecting to attract 500,000 sightseers.

For David Handley, who founded the event 12 years ago, its popularity never ceases to surprise. "I would have needed therapy if you'd told me 12 years ago how big it was going to be," he says. "You wouldn't believe how much work goes on behind the scenes, but once Sydney responded the way it did, you just can't stop."

Giant Scrabble tiles send a peaceful message down to Bondi Beach, a plastic bubble plays on the ocean and a metal gunship-whale hybrid seems ready for take-off alongside twisted railway tracks and seemingly melting stone tyres, a stumpy white marble torso and a surreal red metal picnic table.

Exhibition highlights include US sculptor Fletcher Benton's 1997 work One on Two, Ball and Ring and a $250,000 work from Keizo Ushio. Three Danish sculptors are in the show, a nod to the inaugural international Sculpture by the Sea at Aarhus in Denmark, which will take place in June next year. Japanese sculptor Kozo Nishino has won the inaugural $10,000 Transfield Holdings Kinetic Art Prize for Harmony with the Breeze.

Keizo Ushio, from Japan, has exhibited in Sculpture By The Sea for the past 10 years, making him eligible for the Decade Club, an exclusive group of five artists. To celebrate, he has created one of his largest works, a six-tonne sculpture carved from a single piece of white granite. Every year he watches in delight as viewers run their fingers over his intricately sculpted grooves and polished surfaces. "I always put up a sign saying 'Please touch my work'," he says. "Whenever I make a work for this show, I ask myself how people might play with it. Sometimes children climb up and sit on it. In a gallery, you can't do that, but this open space sculpture should be touched."

Many artists have followed Ushio's lead, creating works that can be stroked, prodded and clambered on. To prepare his stainless- steel humpback whale Humpback Gunship for curious fingers, Benjamin Gilbert from Yackandandah, Victoria carefully smoothed away its sharp edges. Inside the whale's hollow stomach he placed canvas cushions for people to sit on. "I believe art is only valuable when it is used," he says."There's no point in having something precious locked away."

Once a campaigner with Greenpeace, Gilbert hopes the interactive nature of his work will help people understand its anti-whaling message. With a propeller extending from its water spout and wheels below its chin and tail, the whale resembles a small gunship. "The bone structure of the humpback whale has fascinated Japanese scientists for generations," he says. "Perhaps they're really using the whales to make military hardware. It's a ridiculous sculpture about the ridiculousness of Japanese whaling."

The Sydney artist Marguerite Derricourt looked closer to home for inspiration, creating a sculpture of stainless-steel bogong moths clustered around a light bulb. In the evening, the work lights up from within, sending moth-shaped shadows across the path and surrounding rocks. For Derricourt the annual bogong migration has a certain poignancy. "They come from Queensland, heading off to the Snowy Mountains, but they get blown off course and end up banging up against lighted windows in Sydney," she says. "I feel a kind of affinity with them, because I've drifted towards Sydney from lots of different places."

As usual, some artists have taken advantage of the scenery, including Emma Anna, from Melbourne. In huge aluminum Scrabble letters she has spelt the word "imagine" across a cliff, with an empty gap where the second "i" should be. "I imagine people sitting out here on the rocks in the afternoon, looking through the gap in the work to the horizon beyond," she says. "This part of Sydney is such a beautiful space - you can place a very contemplative sort of sculpture here and it just fits."

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Photos courtesy of Rick Rycroft/AP, Tim Wimborne/Reuters, Getty Images, Torsten Blackwood/AFP/Getty Images, and ABC Local (Martin Corben): Michael Lipman

Original Source: Times Online, The Australian, and Sydney Morning Herald