Getting a head

File under: art, urbanism, Wellington

Cathryn Monro's sculpture Per Capita is being installed on the corner of Tory and Cable Streets, ready for its official launch on Friday evening, and thus just misses out on being eligible for the "best public artwork" category of the Wellingtonista awards. It's looking good, though, and bears an interesting relationship with the public space. You can read that as either "how wonderful to be able to interact with public art by walking through it" or "oh great, something else to clutter up the pavements": it's up to you.

Anyone who's worried about public money being spent on such frivolities as art (the very thought!) shouldn't be, since it's been funded by a $100,000 donation from Museum Hotel owner Chris Parkin (with help from the Wellington Sculpture Trust). It seems strange, though, to go through the effort of installing it now, when according to a article in the Dominion Post back in July stated that it would have to be "repositioned once a glass-fronted restuarant is built on the corner. 'One of the huge heads will be relocated to bisect the glass.'" That sounds intriguing, not least because it'll be interesting to see how the restaurant turns out given the blingtastic interior of the hotel.

On a completely unrelated note, while not wanting to reignite the heated and frankly bizarre pod wars that once raged here, it's hard to ignore the article in today's Dominion Post with the slightly misleading headline Monorail Plan for Capital. Actually, no-one's "planning" a monorail here, it's just that a company wants to raise money for a test track, and seems to be throwing around some ideas for potential routes. I won't try to suggest what to think of this, except to point out the appropriateness of the test track's proposed location being Rainbow's End, and that "Lyle Lanley" is still in the running for category 16 of the Wellingtonista awards.