‘Still Life with Stone and Car’ (2004/2006)

Cnr Hickson Rd & Pottinger St, Walsh Bay 2000

For the 2004 Biennale of Sydney, Arkansas-born, Berlin-based artist Jimmie Durham created this installation from a 1999 Ford Festiva hatchback purchased in Homebush and a two-tonne quartz boulder from a Central Coast quarry – painted with a face. Originally the car was parked on the Opera House forecourt, and onlookers watched as Durham painted a face on the stone, before it was dropped on the car from a crane above – crushing it. At the time, Durham told the Sydney Morning Herald, “This piece is concerned with monuments and monumentality, but also with nature; that implacable hard stuff.” In 2006, the piece was permanently installed in its current location in Walsh Bay – in the middle of a roundabout. On approach from either direction along Hickson Road you can notice roadworks signs by Australian artist Richard Tipping that read ‘ARTWORK AHEAD’.