Past | Michael Phillip Garrett

Rubicon Two

2 - 14 March 2021

Join us to celebrate
Thursday 4th March, 6pm

I once watched a troop of kangaroos near Macedon, their heads poking up above the long summer grass. Suddenly startled by a shotgun, they started hopping away, then as a mob, moving almost as a single organism, like a murmuration of birds. Their motion was sinusoidal, again like the wings of a bird, and I witnessed, for the first time, their motion as flying rather than “hopping”.

My first sculpture trying to capture this motion, ‘Rubicon One’ was made from plywood in the tradition of the balsa aircraft frames of my youth. It took forever, weighed a tonne, and was ultimately a failed disaster that sat in our garden until it rotted.

Since Marc Newson’s Lockheed Lounge, I’ve been trying to find a way to resurrect a Rubicon Unit, and the evolution of laser scanning, CAD, 3D printing and programmed sculpting has finally made anything possible.

The notion to depict our national emblem as elegant, mythical, beautiful but noble ultimately became a compulsion.

And in the end, after last year’s terrible Australian fires, 'Rubicon Two' also became a political statement, a weaponised machine against our ongoing war on the climate.