Continuum in 1 Elizabeth - Photography: Brett Boardman
Mikala Dwyer’s Continuum artwork is a series of sculptural elements located in both entrances at Martin Place Metro Station.
The south entrance, at Castlereagh Street, hosts a dramatic and colorful glazed ceramic tile wall mural that celebrates the tempo and shape of train travel – the tracks, sleepers, networks, and repetitive train movements can be seen through simple geometric shapes.
These classical shapes have been further developed into six sculptural prisms which are suspended from the entrance ceiling as if exploding from the ceramic mural. Two of these, the crescent and the track, are flat. There is a folded plane and three models in three-dimensional form including the cylinder, cube and sphere. The sculptures are fabricated from bronze, brass, aluminum, steel, and polished stainless steel.
Continuum in 39 Martin Place - Photography: Brett Boardman
Photography: Brett Boardman
The north entrance at Hunter Street hosts the final sculpture in the sequence. It is a Möbius sculpture suspended in the vast station entrance hall, welcoming customers, marking the space, and inspiring wonder. The Möbius sculpture is made of polished stainless steel and represents an endless, enigmatic form chosen to echo the continual tide of people moving through the transit space below.
Photography: Brett Boardman
The mural and hanging sculptures interact with each other, the spaces of transit and the travel experience. Their enigmatic geometric forms offer a poetic and abstract representation of space and time as experienced through travel. They stimulate curiosity and engagement and create memorable meeting points.
Mikala Dwyer has been exhibiting internationally since 1982 and has developed a distinctive and highly engaging practice that explores ideas about shelter, childhood play, modernist design and the occult. Influenced by early 20th-century art movements, including Dada, Constructivism and Arte povera, her work pushes at the traditional limits of performance, sculpture and installation. Integrating a range of quotidian materials, her sculptures are experimental and experiential architectures that play with the permeable and changeable nature of objects and our relationship with them.
Dwyer’s work has been included in major exhibitions such as the Biennale of Sydney and Know My Name at the National Gallery of Australia. She has been the subject of solo exhibitions at the Art Gallery of NSW and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Sydney. Some of her permanent sculptures for the public domain can found in Sydney in Mary’s Lane, Surry Hills (commissioned by the City of Sydney, 2010), at the site of the former Royal Hospital for Women, Paddington (Woollahra Council, 2012), and at Barangaroo (Lendlease, 2024).
