![\"Grounded](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/09\/d041f30e80af52c88036dbe80d5c36459b46affe.jpeg\")
<\/p>\nIn New York\u2019s Times Square in June Price stopped pedestrian traffic with his 3.6 metre-tall bronze sculpture, Grounded in the Stars. Ancient Feelings is the artist\u2019s first public art commission in Australia.<\/p>\n
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Grounded in the Stars at Times Square New York.Credit: Michael Hull<\/p>\n
\u201cSculpture in the public place is a real art form, we are not just talking about the realm of statues in parks any more,\u201d MCA\u2019s director Suzanne Cotter said. \u201cWe\u2019re a long way from that. We no longer necessarily think about sculpture as something that sits high up on a plinth that represents a certain type of person or event.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhen so much of our experience is mediated and defined by digital technology, it\u2019s the physicality of sculpture the tactility of it that can be incredibly affirming in terms of who we are. You see people walking around and basically looking at their iPhones. This is something that can stop them in their tracks and pull them out of that digital space.\u201d<\/p>\n
The bust was cast using the lost wax technique and assembled from parts made in Switzerland and Shanghai before being shipped to Sydney. Price deliberately uses bronze to connect to the iconography of ancient deities.<\/p>\n
\u201cI grew up in London, and I was lucky enough to be taken to the British Museum a lot by my mother, and so I grew up looking at ancient Egyptian heads and these fragments of monumental sculptures which were part of the identity of some of the greatest nations that ever existed on Earth,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
Price created his sculpture with the greatest detail down to the braiding, and fine wisps of hair at the neck nape. The patina was modified to gleam but not bling in concert with the Sydney Opera House and the MCA\u2019s sandstone facade.<\/p>\n
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\u201cIt has a sort of magic to it, which vibrates, I guess, and we respond to that in an emotional and psychological way. It\u2019s wordless, but you feel it,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
\u201cI\u2019m fascinated by materials and the sorts of associations and messages they carry with them and how we read them, like bronze is often connected with the notion of power, and officialdom, because it\u2019s a fantastic alloy that has been used over centuries to present people in power.\u201d<\/p>\n
Federal Arts Minister Tony Burke is to join arts ministers from across three states and leaders from the arts sector for Thursday\u2019s tax forum which comes at a time when the sector has been impacted by the cost of living, rising costs, stagnating government funding and changing consumer behaviour.<\/p>\n