By Parker McKenzie
At the end of Mason Grove in Sassafras, two new art installations have taken flight along the Ridgewalk.
When walking up the steep hill — known locally as the Old School track — you’ll be greeted by nine Mayan-inspired path marker birds from artist Peter McIlwain.
He said the idea for the markers was dreamed up while sitting at the bottom of the hill.
“I have been working on this method of constructing this sort of three dimensional laser cut idea and I thought birds are fun, people enjoy that,” he said.
“The colours are designed to really sort of jump out in a marker kind of way, so it’s all primaries with gray and black.”
The colourful markers use 3D printed shapes to create different and unique birds, drawing on the mythology of both the Mayans and Indigenous Australian spiritual beliefs.
About 50 metres up the hill, a large statue of a tawny frogmouth stands towering over a seating area. The artist Renate Crow was delighted to discover a local family with their young daughter Violet Gollogly-Rich having already spent time exploring the sculpture.
Ms Crow said she was asked by Yarra Ranges Council to design an art piece for the Ridgewalk.
“I chose the tawny frogmouth because they’re common in our landscape, in both suburbia and the forest,” she said.
“I love the way they like to hide and pretend to be a stick. They’re really generous with their time and sometimes they kind of play with you.”
The Ridgewalk is a project by Yarra Ranges Council aiming to deliver 14km of new and improved tracks featuring permanent sculptures, land art and a program of temporary exhibitions and performances.
Ms Crow learned to weld for the project, which she said was a daunting task.
“I had this crazy idea that I wanted to build something like this and I went to a steel fabricator with my model to see how much this would cost to build,” she said.
“They weren’t able to do it because of Covid and the backlog it created.”
Someone at Westy’s steel fabricator in Ferntree Gully suggested she learn to weld instead and with the help of retired boilermaker Alex Ruschanow, Mr Crow slowly became adept at working steel into the shapes she needed.
Ms Crow said the project wouldn’t have been possible without his guidance.
“He worked with me and taught me the rudiments of how to weld and bend steel, which was pretty amazing,” Ms Crow said.
“My very first welds had a lot of roughness, but by the end of this project they were they were looking way better.”
The steel structure is covered in dried indigenous and exotic leaves to form the feathers on the bird, with its large yellow eyes prominent when you sit inside the hollowed-out belly of the Tawny Frogmouth sculpture.
Ms Crow said the materials came from places special to her.
“Most of the materials are from my garden. A couple of pieces are from the family farm that I grew up on, which is now becoming a housing estate,” she said.
“There’s a couple of pieces of what wedges of grass that are in there that I grabbed just as this property that meant a lot to me was getting sold.”
Mr McIlwain said having two bird-themed art installations was unplanned and happened by coincidence, while also thanking Gretel Taylor from Yarra Ranges Council for her support of the projects.
“I’ve never made anything like this before,” he said.
“I’m very happy I think with the final result.”
