Artist: Susan Morris
Artwork Name: Moon and tide
Medium: stainless steel, concrete
Date Created: 1998
Winner of the 1998 Lake Macquarie Biennial Acquisitive Sculpture Prize, this work reflects and echoes the quiet twilight and evening periods in the lakeside park. The three dominant stainless steel rings represent the phases of the moon – waxing, full and waning. The rings are welded to a ‘wave’ bed at ground level that signifies the tide. An abstracted fish is brazed onto the surface of the wave, reminiscent of the marine life moving as the tide drifts into the lake from the sea.
Sculpture is a meeting place of ideas, feelings, intentions and understanding.
The beginning of my work is a readiness for inspiration from the environment or from a poetic wondering. Then from this seed, I start imagining how to ‘say’ this and in what material. The sculpture grows.
Inspiration can come from anywhere; something ‘speaks’ to me; maybe it affirms something I have been looking for, or makes visible something I have been contemplating. It could be forms or movement in nature; or colours, or relationships between forms and shadows. It could be something solid and permanent, something fragile and ephemeral, or something imponderable.
Slowly a work develops, finding a vitality of its own. Observing the changes in the material stimulates the way I consider and re-consider what I am making. I strive for a balance between the original idea and the material and what develops in the making. – Susan Morris 2016