Artist's Statement for The Demise of Sydney's Maritime Tower Painting
Jacqui McCarthy 2023
Gouache, ink and watercolour on Archers paper 76 x 57cm.
I arrived in this country for the first time in 1985 and worked in Kent Street, Sydney when I spent many a lunchtime sitting in Observatory Park under this Tower which had been built in 1973 as the Port operations and communications centre for Sydney Harbour.  I felt it was the most magnificent viewpoint, over the harbour, and relaxing place to peacefully eat my sandwich and I used to return to the office very chilled out.  When I learned, many years later, that this beautiful Tower was destined to be demolished to make way for some horrible modern construction, I was very disappointed and upset with the powers-that-be who make these seemingly ridiculous decisions in the name of progress.   So being an artist, I decided to record its demise in a compartmentalised descriptive painting in my favourite media and began taking photographs of the demolition work being carried out.  I photographed the progress of the concrete-eating robots that broke up the tower and pushed the debris down the central staircase, every weekend from many vantage points, as the platform housing these machines descended week after week until, in 2016, the beautiful tower was no more.