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Public Artwork-Queenstown Aquatic Centre

Izzat Design's winning proposal

The ‘Remarkable Elements’ installation was made after winning a proposal, in response to an art competition run by the Queenstown Aquatic centre which was under construction at the time. The brief for the competition called for pieces of art that would best represent the surrounding environment of Queenstown with a special reference to ‘The Remarkable’s’, a range of mountains dominating the region.

Our proposal put an original twist to the brief in that we wanted to portray the smaller elements that exist in the mountains yet are often overlooked i.e. the fossils within the rock and the tiny lichens and mosses that cover them. The idea we conceived was to identify the elements, take macro (close-up) photographs of them, and then present them abstractly in three large panels. We felt that to display them in this way, would in effect, elevate their status and give them a grandiose presence similar to the mountain range itself.

To do this we took forty-five scaled images of Ammonite fossils, vegetable sheep moss and various lichens, printed them onto a flexible media and formed these into three sets of fifteen bass relief tiles, each tile measuring 600mm by 600mm by 50mm. Once completed, we encased the tiles in a clear resin to provide integrity and durability, an important factor considering the poolside environment in which they were to be located.

Once we had completed the arrangement of the tiles, we mounted them in three huge, segmented aluminium frames. The frames, each measuring 1.8 meters by 3 meters we had powder coated, a corrosion resistant treatment, which involves baking a plastic compound onto the alloy at high temperature.

We transported the panels down to Queenstown where they now reside, at one end of the pool, looking fantastic. The repetitious enlargements of each element giving an abstract pattern to the panels, showing depth and scale to what are essentially building blocks within the natural world.