If a major arts festival is about making you look at your city in different ways, then Jacob Nash’s ‘Always’ sculpture is sure to be a defining component of this year’s Sydney Festival. The designer and artist – who’s best known for his work with Bangarra Dance Theatre and as production designer for ABC’s Cleverman – has created a 28-metre long sculpture that will sit on the Barangaroo headland, spelling out the word “always”.
It’s a reference to the phrase, “always was, always will be Aboriginal land”, and was suggested to Nash, a Murri man from Brisbane, by Sydney Festival’s artistic director, Wesley Enoch. They started their collaborative process by walking out to the Barangaroo headland – territory of the Gadigal people of the Eora nation and traditionally a rich site for hunting and fishing – and seeing what ideas formed.
“We just thought about where we were, what country we were on, what the message is that we want to share with people, and what an important place we were standing on in our history – black and white,” Nash says.
The questions then started: “How do you respond? Is it like the Hollywood sign? How big is it? What’s it made out of?”
Photograph: Anna Kucera
Instead of building giant letters, Nash decided on the opposite: a huge panel of weathering steel with those letters cut out of it.
“Something within me really wanted people to look at the land,” he says. “And that sparked the first idea: do you look at the word in the negative or the positive? All of a sudden I saw the sign and just imagined looking through the letters, framing the landscape in some way.”
It’s designed to encourage Sydneysiders to consider the history of the land, to imagine what it would be without the arrival of Europeans 250 years ago, and to inspire visitors to delve into the stories of the land upon which they live. But alongside those bigger questions, Nash wants visitors to have an introspective experience.
“If you walk up to it and are looking through at the landscape, where are you? So the reverse side is made with a mirrored finish so you can see yourself within this word and this statement. That’s asking the question of the general public: who are they in this story? Where do they fit in?”
Photograph: Anna Kucera
That’s a pretty big question to be asking Australians at any point, but particularly now when debates over constitutional recognition of Indigenous people as the traditional owners of this land are raging. Although there are significant steps forward, it can seem the journey to recognition and reconciliation has been stifled a bit more than usual lately.
In recent years, we’ve seen governments reject key elements of the Uluru Statement from the Heart and reintroduce forced adoption in NSW. And much of the rhetoric has been as harmful as the policies, with racist cartoons in national newspapers and criticism from the government’s “special envoy for Indigenous affairs” over the prevalence of acknowledgement of country ceremonies at formal events.
In a sense, Nash’s artwork is a large-scale acknowledgement of country, paying tribute to the original owners of the land, and a clear reminder of that ownership.
“As Aboriginal people we can’t stop,” he says. “We’re still going to be Aboriginal people pushing and reclaiming, and making sure that our culture and knowledge is sustained like it has been for 65,000 years.”
Photograph: Anna Kucera
And it’s the breadth and longevity of that culture, and connection to land, that’s core to Nash’s design process and aesthetic. He opted for weathering steel because not only does it have an earthy colour that sits in harmony with the land, but it changes and respond to the land and natural forces.
“We live in a world where there’s manufactured straight lines forever around us. That just didn’t exist [before colonisation]. I mean, what is perfect? A perfect white table just isn’t perfect for me,” he says, looking at the table that sits between us in the Sydney Festival office, where Time Out meets him this interview. “I want to feel the history in it. I want to know story. I want to give people an experience where they can emotionally take something from whatever they’re viewing.”
But most importantly, Nash wants this to be a galvanising experience for the city – a place to reflect, but also one to come together.
“The Aboriginal caretakers of all of our country and nations have looked after this land, and we have to now do that together. Of course it has to be led by Aboriginal people, but I wanted to talk about Sydney as one – I just wanted people to share knowledge.”
Always is at Barangaroo Reserve until January 27.
Check out our top 20 picks of Sydney Festival and the best art exhibitions this month.