SCULPTOR Brendon Taylor’s trip down memory lane has earned him first prize in a competition, Art in Public Places.
Taylor, 51, won the ‘best in show – individual exhibit award’ at the Hobsons Bay Council event for his large sculpture, named Memory Lane.
The Altona resident constructed the piece from an old red gum railway sleeper which was cut into 13 pieces, each representing a stage in his life.
“It’s basically a sculpture of my life, an autobiographical thing. It starts when I was born, up to the present day,” Taylor says.
“It’s called Memory Lane because there’s a laneway carved into the top of it. It’s a metaphor for life, I suppose. It took a lot of nutting out to get it all to fit together and I’m very pleased with the result.”
His exhibit begins with an apple tree, symbolising the one in the backyard of the Werribee house where he grew up.
Other symbols include a television set, which represents his time working for a prop-making company, while a teddy bear on a copper rug points to the birth of his son.
Taylor originally wanted to be a painter, but he switched to sculpting in art school when a lecturer said that if he could sculpt, he could do anything.
He uses a variety of materials in his sculptures depending on the project.
“I’ll think of something I’ll want to make and try and think of the best material to make it out of. I work with plastics, wood, items cast in bronze, silicone, all sorts of stuff; whatever I think will do the job. I’m working on a marble sculpture at the moment.” For the veteran of more than 40 group exhibits and five solo shows, it was the first time in many years he had entered work in the Art in Public Places exhibition, and he was pleased with the award.
Taylor’s love of creating things with his hands extends to his day job at Museum Victoria, where his work includes habitat reconstruction, reassembling dinosaur bones and making dinosaur models, taxidermy, researching, and skin and skeleton studies. He has even retrieved dead whales on beaches for their bones.
“From time to time we get people coming to our department and they find out how we make the things they’ve seen. It really opens people’s minds when [they] find out how things are done,” Taylor says.
Other award recipients included Josh McCrimmon, who received an encouragement award for ‘Lego men, inside and out’, exhibited at Cafe Mies in Spotswood. An award for ‘best use of space’ went to Jan Flook for his thought-provoking display of crows at The Pint of Milk in Newport.
