On my last post I shared some of the sculptures featured in the Swell 2016 Sculpture Festival. As promised, here is a part two of my selection of images.
Up before the sun and with a hit of caffeine, Hubby, Bundy and I were ready to head south to Currumbin, host to the 2016 Swell Sculpture Festival. Sunrise and sunset are the best times to experience the festival, fewer crowds and better light for taking photos. Bundy loves the festival, it is his chance to run around on the sand and meet a few new faces (or sniff new butts to put it in dog terms). Alphy the turtle is the big hit this year, as are the huge deck chairs but I really love the dog walker sculpture and the timber freight boxes lying on the sand. With so many sculptures I have decided to break up the photos and share them in two lots, you will see more of the dog walker and other wonderful works of art sometime next week.
Which one is your favourite?
A visit to the Currumbin Wildlife Sanctuary in Queensland is highly recommended, for children and the young at heart it is a fabulous way to spend a day. As soon as you walk through the entry gate you will smile at the sight of koalas sitting among tree branches, munching away on eucalyptus leaves or having a nap. These beautiful creatures, like so many of our native flora and fauna are victims of progress, their natural environment destroyed by developers and their lives threatened by domestic animals and traffic. The wildlife sanctuary does a wonderful job of raising awareness of the plight of our native animals, educating children and caring for the sick and injured at their wildlife hospital.
There are plenty of opportunities to get up close and personal with some of the animals. For a fee you can have your photo taken cuddling a koala or you can buy food for the lorikeets and kangaroos and feed them by hand. We didn’t do any of that, however we did venture into the kangaroo enclosure and took great pleasure in patting young kangaroos while they were dozing in the sunlight. The largest and oldest of the male kangaroos was taking a nap near the gate, at 8 years old he has fathered plenty of kangaroos, the second male is 4 years old and not quite as large although one of the volunteers told us that his nickname was Fatty.
My friends and I spent a day there recently and we loved every minute. When our legs grew weary and our stomachs hungry we hopped on the people mover train and enjoyed a ride through the park and selected a lunch venue. The sanctuary’s rainforest environment is filled with the sound of birds calling and at times, howling dingoes, the train passes by the enclosures of kangaroos, wallabies, water birds and the Tasmanian Devil. Cameras and phones in hand we took hundreds of photos of creatures we don’t often get to see as well as a few that we will never see in the wild because their numbers are low and they are on the endangered list. I regretted not taking a camera with better zoom than my iPhone, the digital zoom on an iPhone really isn’t great and many of my photos look more painterly than photographic.
The last of my images from the Swell Sculpture Festival 🙂
Walking along such a popular and pretty part of the coast at sunset is a pleasant experience any time of year, during Swell it is made more interesting by the addition of sculptures scattered across the sand and along the esplanade. There are children, dogs and happy snappers everywhere, and even though the signs all say ‘Please don’t climb on the sculptures’, many of them are begging for interaction and it is possible to walk around and through some of the installations. Looking back, I have to wonder whether a theme for the festival could be one of interaction, encouraging children and adults to participate in the piece, firing up their imagination and expressing their creativity.
This gallery is the second of three galleries that I’ll be posting and featuring work from the Swell Sculpture Festival, I hope you enjoy the photographs as much as I enjoyed the exhibition.
The Swell Sculpture Festival at Currumbin is an annual event, this year it was held September 13-22 and featured 50 artworks that ranged from inspiring to quirky, in an array of sizes from small enough to sit on a lamp table to artwork so large that children would need more than a couple of sheets to turn them into cubby houses. The festival has become a bit of a pilgrimage for me, introduced to the event by an artistic friend about 8 years ago, I have been back almost every year with camera in hand and I even managed to introduce a few of my friends to the event.
Last year, the hubby and I took our smallest black dog to Currumbin and watched the sunrise over the festival, it was an awesome experience and I managed to get some pretty good photos in the soft morning light. This year we decided to venture down in the afternoon and see the exhibition as the sun set, the place was packed with others like us, cameras and iPhones in hand, generating thousands of images in one evening so I can only imagine how many photos of the sculptures are now on Facebook, Twitter and Flickr. As usual, I took a few hundred photos and sorting through them has been a bit of a process because some of the sculptures really captured my attention resulting in photographs from several different viewpoints, as well as photographing them in the changing light.
I hope you enjoy part 1 of my series of photographs from the Swell 2013 Sculpture Festival, stay tuned for more throughout the week.
Thank you to everyone who liked my shots of the Swell Sculpture Festival in previous posts: series one and series two, I now present the final series of photographs from the festival and I hope that you’ll like them as much as the earlier images.
A familiar sight on surf beaches all around the world, this piece of work attracted alot of attention and it had me wondering how they managed to keep the towels in position overnight.
Bundy loves attending the Swell Sculpture Festival, not only does he get to ride in the car and go for a paddle in the surf, he also gets to pose with the sculptures and assist with providing a sense of scale to the artwork.
This really didn’t look out of place on the beach, the large rock close to the horizon is known as ‘Elephant Rock’ and you can see the high rise landscape of Surfers Paradise in the background.
There is always a nautilus shell featured in the exhibition.
Water tanks are normally pretty plain and boring, you will find one in most Aussie backyards but they certainly don’t look like this and I can’t imagine that it would hold much water anyway.
I’m guessing the motion of waves inspired this sculpture (no I didn’t read the exhibition program), those made by water and by humans.
Like many native species, the tiger and koala are struggling to stay alive in our constantly changing environment. In Australia, Tiger conservation is a highly promoted and supported, however our native Koala which is in danger of disappearing from our region as a result of growth in development and traffic, has only recently been acknowledge as being in danger by our government. It is shameful that the majority of the Australian population take this beautiful creature for granted, its plight has become ‘invisible’.
A daylight shot of the giant mosquito featured in series one, this thing is huge!
Sums up the festival perfectly 🙂
As promised, part two of my series of photographs from the 2012 Swell Sculpture Festival and there are still a few more to come.
No, the ice cream truck wasn’t a sculpture but I love the ‘retro’ appearance and who doesn’t like enjoying an ice cream by the water.
Just after 4am I arose from a deep slumber courtesy of my husband, the plan, to see the sun rise over the Swell Sculpture Festival on Currumbin Beach. I am not a morning person but once on the sand the enjoyment of being on the beach and watching the sun rise removed all trace of sleep. Photographers with their tripods were everywhere, we unintentionally followed each other along the esplanade, vying for the best position in an attempt to capture a creative photograph of the sculptures on display. There is much for me to learn and I’m pretty sure that some of other people’s images were taken from an angle that never entered my mind, yet I’m pretty happy with the results and I hope you will be too.
The biggest mosquito on the coast was the most popular insect on the coast this morning with several people toting cameras and tripods preparing to capture its silhouette as the sun rose.
The love cats…
This sculpture represents rain, sunshine and wind, which is which? My guess, from left to right is wind, sunshine and rain.
It won’t come as a surprise to any of you that the reflective dogs were one of the pieces that I really loved, seeing them from front, back, left and right gave me something different and interesting to experience.
Sculptures featuring mosaics appear every year, regretfully I did not pick up a program so I don’t know who the artist responsible for this colourful and pretty piece is but the style is familar and I’ve no doubt that their work has been exhibited in Swell for the last few years.
Between May and August humpback whales migrate north along the east and west coasts of Australia to breeding areas off Queensland and in September they begin the return journey to feeding areas in the Antarctic. This sculpture is a beautiful and timely reminder of this annual event, later in the morning we did actually spot a couple of whales off shore, even though they were too far away for me to photograph them it was still an exciting experience.
Can you see the faces? I didn’t notice them at first, distracted by the colour and the reflections it wasn’t until I looked through the lens during my efforts to focus that I noticed them.
With more photos still to come please stay tuned for Swell:series two!
Cheers and have a great weekend 🙂
The Swell Sculpture festival is on again and I plan on cruising down the Currumbin esplanade sometime this weekend to view and photograph the amazing sculptures on display in the open air. Today I want to share some of my favourite Swell sculptures from the last few years.
Enjoy!
Two Black Dogs 