Back in 2019, Lindy Lee stood on a drab bit of pavement in Canberra's national triangle, faced with an offer she couldn't refuse.
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It was an invitation from National Gallery of Australia director Nick Mitzevich to create something monumental.
To mark the gallery's 40th anniversary, she would devise something to fill the space in which they were standing, marking the entrance to the gallery's precinct.
And, for the moment at least, cost was no object.
"We just want you to be as ambitious as you can possibly be," Lee recalls Mitzevich telling her.
![Lindy Lee inside her monumental sculpture at the UAP foundry in Brisbane. Picture by Karleen Minney Lindy Lee inside her monumental sculpture at the UAP foundry in Brisbane. Picture by Karleen Minney](/images/transform/v1/crop/frm/9gmjQxX8MpSQh6J68NHMnY/71c12630-16a2-4467-84ba-4bec5ae1327c.jpg/r0_0_4000_2667_w1200_h678_fmax.jpg)
"There was no brief other than 'Don't even think about the money'. No, that's not an invitation to be reckless. But it was, 'Don't let that thinking impair your creativity. Just think of the most ambitious thing that you could do right now, and we'll see what we can do.'
"And this was it."
Lee is now poised to unveil her masterpiece, the largest work she has ever created and, at $14 million, the most expensive artwork ever commissioned in Australia.
![An artist's impression of Lindy Lee's Ouroboro. Picture: supplied An artist's impression of Lindy Lee's Ouroboro. Picture: supplied](/images/transform/v1/crop/frm/9gmjQxX8MpSQh6J68NHMnY/78dc1ca9-73a0-4d69-9560-47b04204f726.jpg/r0_0_2250_1265_w1200_h678_fmax.jpg)
By day, it will mirror the world around it, reflecting passers-by, cars, birds, clouds and the sunlit sky. At night, it will light up from within, and reflect its light back to the world.
And by the time it stands shining, a beacon to welcome visitors while reminding us of our place in the cosmos, Lindy Lee's Ouroboros will have travelled great distances to get here.
A snake eating its own tail
Ouroboros, her giant stainless steel creation, will sit on Parkes Place, by the gallery's entrance, winking and shining at visitors, drivers and passersby of all kinds.
![Foundry staff working inside Ourobros, preparing for it to be transported to Canberra. Picture by Karleen Minney Foundry staff working inside Ourobros, preparing for it to be transported to Canberra. Picture by Karleen Minney](/images/transform/v1/crop/frm/9gmjQxX8MpSQh6J68NHMnY/ec6cbf4d-e9b1-4b93-9ca0-ad60b14046a9.jpg/r0_116_4000_2365_w1200_h678_fmax.jpg)
Made of 13 tonnes of recycled scrap metal and just 1cm thick, Ouroboros is covered with 45,000 hand-cut perforations, which Lee herself mapped out at her studio on a maquette that was half the size of the final version.
The perforations, of varying sizes, give the impressions of stars and constellations, lit up in the night sky after dark.
Ouroboros is based on the ancient image of a snake eating its own tail - a symbol of eternal return, cycles of birth, death and renewal. Lee is a long-time practitioner of Taoism and Zen Buddhism; for her, humanity and nature are inextricably linked.
![Lindy Lee in her happy place - the UAP foundry in Brisbane. Picture by Karleen Minney Lindy Lee in her happy place - the UAP foundry in Brisbane. Picture by Karleen Minney](/images/transform/v1/crop/frm/9gmjQxX8MpSQh6J68NHMnY/c85e2ede-17cd-4bba-8836-938e869552a8.jpg/r0_187_6461_3834_w1200_h678_fmax.jpg)
The work is also the result of a long artistic and personal journey, from the solitude of her studio to a mighty workforce that has united to realise her vision.
It wasn't a shed
When Lee met Matthew Tobin at a party 10 years ago, she was intrigued when he told her he ran a foundry with his brother, Daniel.
"Matt said to me, 'Next time you're in Brisbane, go to our shed', and I'm thinking it's a double-car garage," Lee recalls.
![Artist Lindy Lee. Picture by Karleen Minney Artist Lindy Lee. Picture by Karleen Minney](/images/transform/v1/crop/frm/9gmjQxX8MpSQh6J68NHMnY/964279b2-cc9e-4ac4-9e23-5a3621795ee3.jpg/r0_422_8256_5082_w1200_h678_fmax.jpg)
"The Tobin brothers are really humble, beautiful people, and you'd never know that they run this massive operation. Anyway, I arrive and it's like, right, this isn't a double-car garage. I'm embarrassed."
Urban Art Projects (UAP) is, in fact, a global company that began in Brisbane as Urban Artists in 1993, and expanded to Shanghai and New York before acquiring Polich Tallix, one of America's main fine art foundries.
It now has outposts around the world, including Los Angeles where it creates the Oscars statues each year.
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The massive Brisbane workshop has about 45 staff, and on the breezy winter day that we visit, a group were busy with Ouroboros, washing it down and preparing to transfer it, in a few weeks, to Canberra.
This will involve removing an entire external wall of the workshop and placing it - wrapped in microfibre, plastic and hand-stitched netting - on a flatbed truck, on which it will travel south with a police escort through various towns before arriving at its final destination outside the National Gallery. The journey will involve cutting branches and moving street signs.
All up, about 200 people have worked for more than 60,000 hours on the project, workers ranging from designers, pattern-makers, metal fabricators and welders, to polishers, engineers, robotics and crane operators, hydraulic and lighting specialists, project managers, excavation and installation personnel, and Lee's own studio team.
The metal has come from sites across Australia and is made from thousands of offcuts, most no bigger than a piece of cutlery.
Down in Canberra, the site is being dug up and prepared for a shallow pond that the work will sit within. Although we're lucky enough, on this Brisbane day, to be standing deep within the tardis-like structure, when it finally lands, people will be able to walk only part-way through, but far enough to see it curve up and around, and understand its sheer scale.
'It's not about being clever'
Much has been made of the $14 million price tag, and at this point, Lee can only be philosophical about it.
On the one hand, the money side feels very real and daunting. She remembers working out the eventual cost with UAP, watching the numbers go up and assuming that she would have to walk away from a vision that would be just too expensive to realise.
"I just didn't think that would happen, but Nick loved it," she says.
"He said once he saw the drawings that I did for this, he couldn't unsee them and their potential."
Mitzevich then took the figure and the drawings back to the gallery's board, with a hefty submission, and got the project over the line. The announcement - the ground-breaking, insistently ambitious $14 million announcement - came after.
"I think initially the reporting of numbers is because there's nothing to talk about ... there's nothing for you to look at," says Lee.
"So of course, it's whatever you can hook on to, and it's the price tag. And I knew that would happen, and it's uncomfortable, I have to say.
"But I also have a certain amount of belief that the proof is going to be in what I create, and I can't make any comment until it's created.
"And so, if it doesn't work, I'm the one who's going to have to wear it, the terrible embarrassment, but if it does work, then everybody's going to have to shut up about the money because it will become very evident why it's cost that much and they're not even going to think about it.
Is she apprehensive about what people might say once it arrives here?
"Apprehensive is not quite the right word - it's going to be interesting," she says.
"Not everybody might like it, but I have a feeling a lot of people are going to like it, because it is so engaging, because it's not about being clever. It's about experiencing something about their existence. That's relevant, and it's true. So that's the best I can do."
She's adamant the work will speak for itself, without any explanation needed from her.
"The experiencing of a work of art is way more important than anything you can say about it - that's just the thing that I will not resile from," she says.
"The great thing about a work of art is the way it can exceed your own normal patterns of thinking, and produce these other things. And it's miraculous."
Lindy's vision
Amanda Harris, UAP's general manager in Brisbane, says Ouroboros, the project, has captivated the team from day one; they will be bereft once it leaves the workshop.
"Our goal from the commencement of the project has really been to deliver something in line with Lindy's vision," she says.
We're standing in a huddle inside the work itself - tardis-like and damp as the staff around us hose the inside, clean and check and consult. We're wearing high-vis vests and special booties to protect the interior, even though the piece will eventually live outdoors in Canberra's elements.
Harris says the sculpture will be up to the task - marine-grade stainless steel with a 500-year lifespan.
"It's specified so that it's maintainable - it has to have an ongoing kind of life," she says.
"It's an ambitious vision, it's been an ambitious project for us to deliver, there's a lot of details that we've felt are really important to retain for Lindy, and the biggest challenges are related to the engineering.
"The artwork itself is just a skin - a very heavily perforated skin, there's no additional structure. It's the only thing holding the entire work up, including the tail, which is hovering above us, it's not tied back. The only thing holding the work [up] is the integrity of the work itself."
The foundry has collaborated on dozens of major projects around the world, but Harris says Ouroboros is the most ambitious she and her team have ever encountered.
"It's the largest single budget, but the engineering side of it is by far the most complex that we've worked on," she says.
"Everything that has ever happened"
Born in Brisbane, Lee is the daughter of Chinese immigrants who fled Guangdong province in China after the rise of communism. She grew up an outsider, surrounded by racism, but felt alienated when she first visited China as a young woman and couldn't speak the language. Career-wise, she tried graphic design and teaching, before eventually realising that art was her calling.
Lee knows the fact of a Chinese Australian woman receiving such a large commission is significant; she was recently made a Member of the Order of Australia, something she found personally irrelevant, but recognises its meaning for others.
"It means something physical to others, actually - young Asian women who want to be artists. People have come up to me and said how important my existence has been to them. And so that's why it's important."
Although she has thought deeply about her own identity and incorporated these questions into her work, she's equally fixated on where she, and everyone else, fits into the universe. And this is where Ouroboros comes in.
"What is it that I want people to experience? That is a really deep connection with cosmos," she says.
"Cosmos is the length, the depth and breadth of everything that has ever happened, exists right now, and exists in the future. And none of us will ever fall outside of that cosmos, that web of connection.
"So that's what this work is about, being eternally returned to this point of connection to the very nature of what existence is, and to be touched by it."
- Ouroboros, by Lindy Lee, will be unveiled on October 25.
- Sally Pryor and Karleen Minney travelled to UAP in Brisbane courtesy of the National Gallery of Australia.