Various spellbound rural Victorian sheep, cows, wombats, bunyips and gumnut and gumblossom babies have already had a sneak preview of a spectacle, a birthday surprise for Canberrans, that Canberrans can't see (or even have described to them) until Saturday at the earliest. It is the unique, hot-air balloon that Robyn Archer, that fountain of centenary ideas, commissioned Australian artist Patricia Piccinini to design. Look heavenwards on Monday morning, Canberrans, because this mystery juggernaut is to be launched then, probably from in front of Old Parliament House.
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In conversation with Piccinini in Canberra on Monday your frustrated columnist begged and begged her to tell us something, anything about the balloon.
But she apologised that, though she'd love to talk about it (''Because I'm so proud of it!'') and had asked if she could tell all to this reporter from so distinguished a broadsheet, she had been sworn to secrecy. She would only disclose, making the suspense worse, that ''it's not a normal-shaped balloon''.
And it turns out that the aforementioned sheep, cows, wombats etc already know this because the balloon was given a test flight, with Piccinini aboard, over their swivelling heads, near Mount Arapiles in a remote Victorian spot (within driving distance of her studio in Collingwood) where there'd be no journalists to see it.
We can be sure, though, that if the balloon is truly Piccininiesque it will be quite a sight for us when we do get to see it. Her sculptures are famously astonishing and yesterday, perhaps (but perhaps not) giving us a glimpse of the kind of thing that will float over us on Monday, she was installing two of them in the Canberra Museum and Gallery's Gallery 4, the glass-walled space on Civic Square.
Lots of Civic Square pedestrians' noses will be pressed up against Gallery 4's shopfront-like window (lit up at night) to marvel at Eulogy (in which a figure so lifelike I at first took it to be the artist cradles and admires and quietly grieves over a dead fish), and The Strength Of One Arm (in which an indescribable but largely human acrobat figure holds himself aloft with one muscular arm plonked on the back of an actual, but taxidermised, goat, a Siberian ibex).
While we were there five young men, not looking or sounding like your average arts patrons, came up and pressed their manly noses against the window.
''These [Eulogy and The Strength of One Arm are a very good accompaniment to the balloon commission I've been privileged to be given,'' Piccinini explains.
In conversation she is intense and enthusiastic and, if Canberra Times style permitted, I'd report lots of her words in italics to show how she herself stressed them, the way passionate people really do when they talk. She was born in 1965 in Sierra Leone and arrived in Canberra as a seven-year-old. She went to Red Hill Primary, Telopea Park High, Narrabundah College and the ANU.
''The two sculptures put the balloon in context. The balloon is a floating sculpture, and the balloon is part of my practice in the way that these sculptures are. So, with Eulogy this is not a fish I've imagined and created, it is an actual fish species that's in danger of being trawled out of existence. It's in the deep seas between South Australia and Tasmania. It's completely gelatinous and inedible but it's being caught up with the crabs that are being trawled for. I find this an everyday tragedy and he [the young man I had mistaken for her] is an everyday man. He's moved by it. He's not histrionic. He's not jumping up and down, but he's moved by the passing of this
fish.''
Still no clues there, though, about the balloon, other than that it won't surprise if it has some environmental message. Then, given the fish, given the taxidermised goat and given that there are taxidermised peacocks in another of her works (more of the latter in another column, soon, while the outraged city is still so peafowl-minded over the government cruelty to the peafowl of Narrabundah) it won't surprise anyone if the balloon is the shape of one of God's creatures.
We begged and begged for a clue about the balloon but she was adamant. ''I'd love to, because I'm so proud of it. But I just, I just can't,'' she insisted.
A less scrupulous reporter from a publication with looser morals would probably at this stage have offered her some breathtaking bribe. Instead we chose to be disarmed by her childlike delight in the project.
''Robyn Archer asked me to make the balloon because, as she said, there's a ballooning culture here in Canberra.
''It's very exciting for me because generally my work is in museums. People come in and they know it's an artwork. But this is a work that's flying through the sky. All kinds of normal people [who might never go to an art gallery] will see it! That's really exciting for me.''
■ Although it won't go aloft until Monday, the balloon, inflated, will be tethered at the National Gallery of Australia from about 8.30am this Saturday (to adorn a sculpture symposium). It will be officially ''launched'' there (but will remain tethered, straining, like a goat or an ibex) by Robyn Archer and Patricia Piccinini at 10am.
