Lindy Lee was standing in the sculpture garden at the National Gallery of Australia, wondering what she was doing there. The gallery’s director, Nick Mitzevich, had taken her for a walk and they paused at a “pretty dull spot”, as Lee recalls it.
That was when Mitzevich explained why she was there: he wanted her to create an artwork that would “announce the NGA is here”. “I want you to be as ambitious as you possibly can,” he told Lee.
There was no brief, Lee says, “other than don’t even think about money. That is not an invitation to be reckless, but don’t let that thinking impair your creativity”.
She didn’t. But still – as Lee went big and then even bigger, so did the cost. “At first I thought, ‘oh my God, it’s going to be $5m.’ Like goodbye. And then it kept going up. Like, OK, it was a nice idea. I just didn’t think it would happen.” But when Mitzevich saw the drawings, Lee says, he couldn’t “unsee them or their potential”.
The cost of Lee’s work has been controversial, polarising. No single Australian artist has ever been given $14m, which came from the NGA collection development fund. But four years later, Lee’s audacious unfettered ambition sits gleaming and coiled in the Brisbane foundry where it was made. All 13 tonnes of it. The factory wall will have to be knocked down to get it out.
She is now standing inside her creation, the light from its 45,000 perforations dancing across her face. It is titled Ouroboros, derived from ancient Greek, a serpent or dragon swallowing its own tail. It is a symbol of eternal renewal: the cycling and recycling of existence.
It is also an engineering feat that has taken approximately 200 people more than 60,000 hours to complete. “There is no additional structure” says the general manager of Urban Art Projects, Amanda Harris, who was commissioned to construct the work. “It is not tied back. The only thing holding the entire work up, including the tail, is the integrity of the work itself.”
Ouroboros is made of recycled scrap metal sourced in Australia, some of it half the size of a piece of cutlery before it was melted down. Nothing like this has ever been created in the country. There are two kilometres of welding seams. “We’ve done our best to make them disappear”, Harris says.
On Friday it will begin its four-day journey to Canberra. Wider than a road; travelling as a packed artwork, it is 9 metres long, 7 metres wide and 4.6 metres high. It will require a police escort, roads and towns will be shut down, trees will be trimmed and it will just scrape over bridges to get through Goondiwindi, West Wyalong and across the border to Canberra.
Growing up in Brisbane, Lee was often the only Chinese person in her school: “It’s kind of significant emotionally for me that it was made in Brisbane. And just the idea of it having this migratory passage through Australia, through the heartland of history, it’s just poetic,” she says.
A Zen Buddhist, Lee says the intention of the work is “to give a kind of intimate experience of our true connectedness. Cosmos is the length, breadth and depth of everything that has existed, exists now and will exist. And none of us will ever fall outside of that web of connection … That’s what I want to express.”
When it reaches the NGA, Ouroboros will sit over water. Its shiny polished mirror surface will reflect the sky, the birds in flight, the people around it – and perhaps because of its scale, cost and vaulting aspiration, us as a nation.
Ouroboros will open in late October to mark the 40th anniversary of the NGA. Lee says for her work on the project, she has been paid “nothing more than a modest salary”.
“The proof is going to be in what I create. And if it doesn’t work well, I am the one who is going to have to wear the terrible embarrassment of that,” she adds. “But if it does work, then everybody’s going to have to shut up about the money because it will become very evident why it’s cost so much and you’re not even going to think about it.”
Will Lee be accompanying Ouroboros on its procession of lights and sirens through country towns? “Hell yeah.” Onwards into battle she will go.