Public Realm

CAStudios undertake projects with a strong engagement with arts and cultural practice, across all scales and programs. These include integrated public art projects within major infrastructure and urban design projects, cultural planning and place making projects, as well as regular participation in public exhibitions.

Our work in the public realm conceives places to be woven from many historical strands, many physical as well as immaterial vectors, and imagines great places to be those that weave these strands into patterns that enable varied modes of encounter and dwelling. The best public art proceeds by identifying and focusing these patterns in 'knots' of great beauty and resonance. 

Great public art creatively transforms a profuse heritage of local experience into a memorable figure. The figure can be a sculpture, a landscape design, a temporary installation - or a rich combination of these. But whatever its form, it evolves as a re-membering of site. What are these memories? They include the concatenation of local and global contexts, indigenous tracks, the architectural footprints of colonial settlement and industrial development, and significant events in the city's social and political life. But they also include the other mobile history of everyday life - that usually unremarked history of the mundane and insignificant: children playing, lovers canoodling, the passage of light across the sky, the dapple of light and shade, the textures and patinas of time. 

Great public art is the gathering of these impressions into a strange new form in which a community can read the history of its own footsteps, and, by this, participate again in the process of place-making and remembering. Rewriting these in new pathways, meeting places and memorable sculptural events, the best public art lets the community participate in the experience of place-making.