Client: Art & About Sydney

Overview

This piece is a six-story hurricane of color. The flagging tape is attached in six unique layers to the hoisted and custom-fabricated structure at the gantry level above. Six colors of flagging tape swirl in concentric rectangular shapes, each layer rotating in the opposite direction of the one before. By using mathematical progressions between hues in tandem with each layer’s unique rotational offset, Geckler plays upon human optical perception that mixes six individual colors into a rainbow of gradients. The artwork is 51.4 x 27.5 x 84.8 feet and was created out of flagging tape, paint, wood, and hardware.

Goals

The main goals were to create this larger-than-life artwork accessible to the community, and work with resident volunteers and the City of Sydney to install it within a historic venue without damaging the unique architecture. Working together with the City, volunteers, an architect, and my studio team, we made this possible!

Process

The artwork’s venue, Customs House, is a historic building in Sydney, NSW, Australia, and aims to engage the thousands of tourists brought to the site every day. Created out of Geckler’s signature medium of flagging tape, she takes it one step further to transform the medium’s capacity as a construction signage tool into a hyperbolic wayfinding symbol for the City of Sydney. Geckler worked with an architect who devised a proprietary vertically-integrated system that was designed to make the actual installation of her most complex artwork to date as straightforward as possible. The City of Sydney alongside with Geckler recruited volunteers via a community posting, and they were able to enter at all stages of the project to find an intuitive and easy to follow system of tasks to assist in the community project. We worked across two points in the globe to create this vision, and countless individuals in Sydney to create a work of art that was an immersive and stunning experience to both tourists, locals, and city professionals alike.