In a win that he has described as “extraordinary”, Highlands sculptor David Ball has taken out first prize at the world’s largest outdoor sculpture exhibition.
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Ball, who is based in Mittagong, was awarded the $60,000 first place at this year’s Sculptures by the Sea in Bondi.
His piece, ‘Orb’, is a towering circular sculpture handmade from steel.
Ball said he was “shocked for a week” after winning the top prize at the exhibition, which he said “every sculptor wants to be in”.
“It means that I can work on my own work for six months without having to think about anything else. And it also means [the sculpture] has been seen, enjoyed and appreciated and that’s a big thing,” he said.
Stretching 2km from Bondi to Tamarama, the sculpture exhibition features more than 100 site-specific pieces by artists from Australia and around the world.
Ball said Orb, which took roughly 10 weeks to create, is part of a wider series of circular sculptures he has been working on that take their cues from the Australian bush.
“I work with the landscape,” he said.
“I'm always looking for shapes and simple forms that can be blown up into a larger scale, simplified and distilled down into an elemental form that can hopefully speak to the world around it and to the environment that it sits in,” he said.
The sculptor, who grew up near a bush-lined river in Sydney before migrating south, said he is particularly fond of steel as a material for the “lyricism” it can achieve.
“[Orb] is industrial in its material but not in its form,” he said. “It’s not mathematical, it’s very organic – the shape grows and evolves.”
This year’s Sculptures by the Sea is expected to draw more than 500,000 people to the coastal walk. Running for 18 days, the exhibition is open until Sunday, November 5.