Sea sculpture’s Jewish flavour
TWO Jewish sculptors are among the artists on show at this year's Sculpture by the Sea, an exhibition of sculptures that dots the coastline between Bondi and Tamarama.
TWO Jewish sculptors are among the artists on show at this year’s Sculpture by the Sea, an exhibition of sculptures that dots the coastline between Bondi and Tamarama.
American sculptor Richard Heinrich is displaying his work Such Sweet Thunder, while renowned English sculptor Sir Anthony Caro’s piece Erl King is also on display.
Heinrich describes his work as “constructivism” — taking pieces of things and putting them together to create something grander than its parts.
“You might think of it as animating inanimate material,” he said.
For Such Sweet Thunder, he was inspired by looking at the nuts and bolts essence of structures such as  New York City subway columns and the Sydney Harbour Bridge.
“Basically what I’m trying to do is make a steel construction that mimics industrial steel vocabulary and put it all together into something that’s hopefully pleasing and attractive, and perhaps mysterious in a way,” he said.
“I’m taking something from a very common occurrence that everybody sees all the time and isolating it so that it causes people to look more closely.”
Heinrich said he was honoured that his work was selected for the esteemed exhibition.
“It gives me a kind of support and affirmation that having been a sculptor for 40 years, somebody recognises that and says that what I do has value and significance, and in an international sense I rate some kind of merit,” he said.
The New York resident said being in Sydney reminded him of home.
“Everybody in New York is from someplace else in one way or another, either culturally or temperamentally, and I’ve found the same to be true here,” he said.
“The people are matched to me in a way that’s really uncanny. I feel completely at home here. And seeing kosher butchers and seeing some Chassids with tzitzit hanging out, I thought ‘Gee, it’s like being back in New York’.”
The son of an Orthodox-raised father and a mother brought up in a Yiddish-speaking “socialist home”, Heinrich describes himself as “culturally Jewish”.
“To say that religion informs my work, I can’t say that it’s direct, but certainly everything that you grow up with, everything that influences you, informs the work that you do,” he said.
And he has a strong Aussie connection: his niece, Professor Leah Garrett, is the Loti Smorgon Chair of Contemporary Jewish Life and Culture at Melbourne’s Monash University.
Now in its 14th year, Sculpture by the Sea runs until November 14.
GARETH NARUNSKY
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