Wednesday, 13 August 2025
Government House
Her Excellency the Honourable Margaret Beazley AC KC

Bujari Gamarruwa

Diyn Babana, Gamarada Gadigal Ngura

In greeting you in the language of the Gadigal, Traditional Owners of these lands and waterways, I pay my respects to their Elders past, present, and emerging. I extend that respect to the Elders of all parts of our country from which you have travelled today. I pay tribute also to the culture of belonging and connection to landscape that First Nations art, ceremony, and dance has so extraordinarily embodied, and continues to do so, for millennia.

I begin with a story about the Norwegian artist Edvard Munch.

His doctor was visiting, and, on approaching the painter’s house, noticed the garden full of paintings, some still unfinished, some in trees, some leaning against fences, all out in the open. When he asked the painter why he’d left his works outside unprotected from the elements—the snow, the rain, the sun—Munch reportedly replied, “It does them good to fend for themselves.”^[1]

Now, whatever else has been made of this anecdote since—for instance, used as evidence of Munch’s purported ‘cure-or-die’ approach to painting practice—it does convey a certain antagonistic view of the relation between art and nature.

It is a conception entirely at odds with what we celebrate today, the art of sculpture and the arts festival that so beautifully showcases its particular and special potential.

Of course, Munch was a painter, and sculpture differs from painting in many important ways.

There is the obvious: its three-dimensionality and its materiality—its ‘thingness’—a quality of being here in the world, and thereby less shackled by presumptions of needing to look like something else, because it already is, in an immediately obvious sense, a ‘something’ itself.

Nor, in its outdoor, public form does it depend on the sanctity of the climate controlled, spotlit museum or gallery space. Instead, it relishes the outside and the opportunities it presents—the changing weather, the changing light, the changing aspects unfurled as we walk by, around, and even through its expanse. It opens wide the rich reciprocity of conversation—serious or playful, full of whimsy or profundity, often all of these—between a work and the world it is surrounded by and with which it infuses, communes, and entwines.

Sculptures in the Vineyards—the Wollombi Valley Sculpture Festival—has been empowering just such conversations since 2002.^[2] The longest running regional sculpture festival in NSW, second in scale only to Sculpture by the Sea,^[3] it has connected, built, and enriched community—whether in its beautiful valley home or in the broader artistic world.

Of course, this legacy was not built from happenstance, but from the committed and collaborative dedication of donors, local businesses, operations and curatorial teams, supporters, and volunteers.

And here, it would be remiss of me not to mention Susan Leith-Miller, who—since 2019 and through 5^[4] Festivals—including one online^[5]—has overseen an inspiring expansion in the footprint, calibre, and engagement of this extraordinary Festival.

Susan has recently decided to step from her Festival Director duties, and I take this opportunity to thank her for all her efforts and achievements.

It was through conversations with Susan that we established the Governor’s Prize in 2022, offering the opportunity for the selected work to be displayed here on the grounds of Government House as part of our Sculptures@theHouse program.

Last year’s recipient, Michael Snape’s Copse, was installed here last December.

It is a work enfolding and continuing both the sculptural conversations I touched on before, as well as its own particular story. Its origins lie in his 2020 exhibition ‘The Folded Forest’. Featuring 29 individual works of cut and folded steel,^[6] their curves were inspired in part by the new Crown Sydney at Barangaroo.^[7] As Michael wryly wrote “We can choose neither our parents nor our influences!”^[8]

Afterwards, he realised, when he brought these individual pieces together in clusters, the resulting works “spoke more volubly. 29 sculptures became 5. Copse emerged second.”^[9]

More voluble, but not loud… a quiet, elegant meditation on its internal rhythms of curved lines, verticality, and angled planes. A flickering movement made when circling around but never finding the front.^[10] Seeing beyond and through, whether the sky or water of Farm Cove, whose salty air contributes to the surface’s reddening hue, or the dappled skyline of trees or silvery skyscraper.

Indeed, there is also a little irony, a little reminder, a little serendipity. When viewed from the east, if not for a large tree in between, Copse would be cast against the tapered top of the building partly inspiring those cool, repeated curves.

To Michael, to all the contributing sculptors—whether to Sculptures@theHouse^[11] or Sculptures in the Vineyards,^[12] to all those that have helped bring together these astonishing dancelike fugues, these inspiring conversations, the deepest and warmest of thanks.

[1] Henrik Bering, ‘The Pain Painter [Review of Sue Prodeaux, Edvard Munch: Behind the Scream, Yale University Press, 2006]’, 1 April 2006, Hoover Institute online, available here

[2] ‘About Us’, Sculpture in the Vineyards website, available here

[3] Information provided by Sculptures in the Vineyards

[4] 2019, 2020, 2021, 2022, 2024. A decision was made in early 2023 for the previously annual Festival to be held biennially: Wollombi Sculpture in the Vineyards Facebook post, 28 February 2023, available here

[5] The 2021 Festival was held virtually due to COVID: Sculpture in the Vineyards website, 29 August 2021, available here

[6] Artist Statement for Copse, on the Governor of NSW website, available here

[7] Artist Statement for ‘The Folded Forest’, on the Australian Galleries website, available here

[8] ibid.

[9] Artist Statement for Copse, on the Governor of NSW website, available here. The first ‘cluster’, The Choir, was exhibited at Sculpture by The Sea in 2024.

[10] “No matter how many times you circle the sculpture, you can never get to the front”: Artist Statement for Copse, on the Governor of NSW website, available here. The first ‘cluster’, The Choir, was exhibited at Sculpture by The Sea in 2024.

[11] Guests include Paul Selwood (whose Australia and Parterre are still part of Sculptures@theHouse) and Ron Robertson-Swann (whose Nijinsky, as winner of the 2022 inaugural Governor’s Prize was displayed in the years 2022-2023).

[12] Guests contributing to the 2024 Wollombi Sculpture Festival include: Ron Robertson-Swann (exhibited Benkei [107] and At the End of the Rainbow [147]); David Ball (exhibited Passage [109]), Paul Selwood, (exhibited Inland Sea [86] and Blue Note [98]); and Ayako Saito (exhibited Dancing in the Void [40] and From Here to There [85], and won the Hampstead School of Art Prize): Sculpture in the Vineyards: Wollombi Valley Sculpture Festival 2024 Catalogue, available here