‘I do think art can change us’: Lindy Lee AO FAHA on creating & creation

Lindy Lee AO FAHA standing in front of ‘Ouroboros’, National Gallery of Australia

It’s a bright day in late October when I meet Lindy Lee AO FAHA in the foyer of the National Gallery of Australia. Just over a hundred metres away, on the edge of King Edward Terrace, her latest sculpture Ouroboros glitters under the midday sun. Placed in a small pool of shallow water, a path extends into the sculpture allowing visitors to step into the belly of the Ouroboros — it is the first of Lee’s work that allows people to interact with it in this way.

It’s also her most expensive — the $14 million price tag raised eyebrows in the weeks ahead of its unveiling.

“Look, I do want to address it,” says Lindy as we sit down to eat lunch in the NGA café. “The fact of the matter is that yes, it did cost $14 million. Every aspect of this sculpture was created and developed in Australia. Each panel was cut, welded, assembled and polished by hand. We employed over 300 people on this project. Some welders started and completed their apprenticeships working on the Ouroboros.”

“So, when people harp on the price tag, I think — so what!”

In June 2024, the completed Ouroboros departed Brisbane for Canberra. Lee joined the journey, riding with the truck drivers as her sculpture weaved through Goondiwindi and Dubbo, precariously crossing narrow bridges and navigating tight turns. The 1250-kilometre journey was documented in the mini-series, Art Truckers.

Creating art & industry

Lindy has collaborated with Urban Art Projects (UAP) Foundry, based in Brisbane, for several years to fabricate, install and deliver her sculpture art across the globe.

“I sent the plan of the Ouroboros to the team, and I knew it was different,” she says. “It was more ambitious. Impossible, almost. It wasn’t like anything we’d done before.”

Lindy’s 2015 sculpture, The Light of Stars, was also created in collaboration with UAP.

“Stars has an internal frame. It’s very subtle but you can see it,” she continues. “With Ouroboros, I wanted to do away with that completely — and I wanted people to be able to step inside this free-standing artwork, to experience it in multiple ways. That was different. That was something I’d never done before.”

“We had to create new technologies, new methodologies, to bring that vision to life — no one in the world could make Ouroboros at the time I put the plans together, but UAP found a way. They never asked me to compromise my vision for the artwork. They worked on and developed new techniques and methodologies to create Ouroboros,” she says. “Now we have all these groups bringing their projects to Brisbane to harness the knowledge that Ouroboros demanded. We’ve created industry. We’ve created jobs.”

A sense of infinity

The Life of Stars (2015) in the forecourt of the Art Gallery of South Australia.

Ouroboros was commissioned to celebrate the National Gallery’s 40th anniversary.

“I was first approached on that same spot [on King Edward Terrace] almost four years ago. Nick [Mitzevich] asked me if I’d like to put something here, on the corner, where I was standing. I said ‘okay, well what would it be? How much?’ Nick told me to be as ambitious as I liked, not to think about the budget but just to create. I’m always thinking ‘stay within budget’ and that does direct you. But Nick was giving me free rein to come up with something.”

“And the first thing I thought of was something that invoked infinity and belonging. That invoked the cosmos. For me, it’s the length and breadth of everything that has and will ever exist. None of this, none of us, ever fall outside of that web of connection.”

In the early 1950s, Lee’s parents migrated from China to Brisbane/Meanjin. Lee was born in Brisbane in 1954, under the White Australia policy, and acknowledges the alienation and discrimination she experienced during her childhood influences her work today.

“White Australia was really the spine of Australian policy, and those very racist policies really permeated into who you were and your sense of self,’ she explains. ‘When you’re a child, you don’t understand that you are being discriminated against. You just understand that there is something deeply wrong about who you are.”

“So, at the very beginning there was a sense of not fitting in, and that work, that idea of belonging and inclusivity has followed me all my life. That and the principles of Zen.”

“I do think art can change us.”

Allowing the frolic

Lee has been a practicing Zen Buddhist since the early 1990s.

“A central principle to Zen is that nothing is permanent and everything changes.”

Daoism is also influential in her art.

“I’m just a vehicle for the material,” Lindy Lee continues. “There is a Daoist expression ‘virtue is receptive’ and I really think that that is the most important aspect of my craft. I don’t create anything. The capacity to be complete with the world and see what it is, and for that curiosity to arise and not to say, ‘this is what I want it to be, and it’s going to mean this, and it’s going to have this effect.’ I mean seriously, how do I know any of that?”

“All I know is that there is a deep attraction to an idea, a materiality and a bit of writing sometimes, and then it starts, and you let it have its way and it starts joining other things. All I am doing is just providing a host situation for all these little critters to come together and see what they want to do with each other, and this is the virtue of the receptive.”

“Step out of your own way and allow the frolic to happen.”

English writer Phillip Pullman is another significant influence on Lee’s work.

“His Dark Materials has been an enormous influence on my life and creative practice across all my work,” says Lee.

His Dark Materials is a series of young-adult fantasy novels, first published in 1995, is a re-telling and inversion of John Milton’s Paradise Lost from where Pullman gleaned the series title. The trilogy exists in a multiverse, where the characters are able to move between parallel worlds.

“It’s my favourite book series. Not only is it a coming-of-age, of this girl who is split between different worlds, who is questioning where she belongs, both in a physical sense, in what world, in what universe, but also within her family, her life. And then there’s the web, the understanding that everything is connected. It’s really been formative to my work, and to my understanding of self.”

Light, place & the sense of belonging in the Sculpture Garden

Ouroboros sits on the corner of King Edward Terrace across the National Gallery’s large sculpture garden, and only meters from another popular attraction — James Turrell’s Within Without.

“I really thought about how my work would interact with others in the garden,” Lee continues. “James Turrell is one of my favourite artists because he gives you the entire experience. They’re simple ideas — just make a hole in the ceiling in the sky — but the framing, the way he understands and celebrates light and connection and the universe. He’s one of my biggest inspirations. Immediately, I knew I wanted to play off the way he immersed people inside of his work.”

Lee laments the lack of public sculpture gardens in Australia. “Sculpture gardens allow different ways of experiencing and interacting with art, and a way to give real experience and real connection to what it is to be human. All of this art is about being human.”

“Art is the only way we can explore being human, seeing what we are and understanding what we are. Whether that’s writing or painting or music or sculpture. Art shows us who we are.”

Carved in stone

After lunch, Lindy Lee takes me on a tour of her accompanying exhibition, which will run until 1 June 2025. Curated by NGA’s Head Curator Deborah Hart and Assistant Curator Deirdre Cannon, the exhibition brings together highlights of Lindy’s career, including her flung bronze artwork, Fluctuations in the abyss (2022).

“This is what is next,” Lee says, gesturing to the new installation of thin camphor laurel branches, Charred Forest. The logs are charred black, and conical holes are then drilled into the wood, revealing the light timber underneath.

“These branches are from my friend’s property in northern New South Wales. Camphors are highly invasive and through the process of stripping them to replace with Indigenous species, I was able to source these dead branches.”

“Camphor trees are considered sacred in China — it’s just another way to express ideas of displacement and belonging, where what is considered sacred in one place is considered unwanted elsewhere. Everything is always full circle.”

As we make our way out to the Ouroboros, Lee says, “there’s something important I want to show you. Something not many people know.”

We bypass the Ouroboros completely as Lee scans the large stones placed around the perimeter of the sculpture.

“There it is,” she says, taking me to the top right corner. “A few weeks ago, we received phone call from the company installing these stones, which are supposed to be more-or less square with a flat top and side, so that people can sit if they choose to. They said one of the stones had chipped accidentally and a large portion had fallen off. It was going to take weeks to get a replacement. Then they sent me a picture of what it looked like. All my life I’ve been working with the idea of infinity, and then this happens.”

An accident revealed the symbol for infinity in this stone.

Lee indicates to a rock. The chipped edge has revealed the sign of infinity.

“So of course I said, ‘this is perfect!’, and they were pretty surprised at my reaction, but seriously, isn’t this so perfect?”

“That was developed over thousands and thousands of years,” says Lee. “Out of all the stones we chose, out of any stone the chip could happen to — it revealed this. For this project. I think that’s pretty special.”

Lindy Lee’s solo exhibition will run until 1 June 2025 on Level 2 of the National Gallery of Australia. Ouroboros, is open twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week in the forecourt of the NGA’s Sculpture Garden.

The post ‘I do think art can change us’: Lindy Lee AO FAHA on creating & creation appeared first on Australian Academy of the Humanities.