Vortex

I made Vortex for the 2022 Swell Sculpture Festival on the Gold Coast. I'd been thinking about water carving through rock. Not the dramatic erosion you see in canyons, but the patient spiral of a pothole wearing into stone. The kind of formation you find at Bourke's Luck in South Africa, where water has twisted through layered rock for thousands of years. Spirals within spirals. Time made visible.

The form came from two references. The first was the vortex itself, water moving in a helix as it falls or drains. The second was the superellipse shape I'd used in Superegg, a mathematical form that sits between a circle and a square. Stretched vertically and twisted around a central axis, it creates the spiral.

The structure is fifty-six individual aluminium sheets, each one cut and shaped, then mounted horizontally along a steel central pole. The sheets graduate in size from bottom to top, creating the taper. Each sheet is rotated incrementally around the axis. The rotation follows a calculated progression so the spiral appears continuous, not stepped.

I used raw aluminium sheet, 5mm thick. The edges were polished by hand to catch light. No anodising, no coating. Just the metal itself. Aluminium behaves like water in some ways. It reflects, it shifts depending on angle and light. On the beach at Swell, the sculpture disappeared in certain conditions. In harsh midday sun, it became nearly invisible. At dawn and dusk, when the light was low and warm, it held the sky and fractured the horizon into layers.

The installation used the same buried post system I'd developed for Superegg. A steel base sunk below the sand line, the sculpture mounted above ground level and bolted in place. It needed to withstand wind, salt, and the occasional curious festival-goer leaning on it. It did.

The biggest challenge wasn't structural. It was the mathematics. Spacing each sheet so the spiral read as continuous required precise calculation. Too much rotation and it fragments. Too little and it becomes a stack. The progression had to be exact. I worked through the calculations, cut and polished all fifty-six edges, then assembled it in my workshop before preparing it for transport to the Gold Coast.

Vortex didn't sell at Swell. It didn't attract much attention. The viewing conditions on the beach worked against it. People walked past in full sun and saw almost nothing. But the work did what I wanted it to do. It captured light. It held multiple views at once. It showed how a single form can appear and disappear depending on where you stand.

The sculpture is back with me now. It's proven the durability I built into it. Three years on, the aluminium still holds its polish. No corrosion, no degradation. It's waiting for the right location. Somewhere with variable light. Somewhere people can walk around it and watch it change.