Brisbane’s Kangaroo Point Park was officially opened on Sunday 24 January 2010 following the redevelopment of the TAFE college site at Kangaroo Point. Offering sweeping views of the Brisbane River, CBD and Botanic Gardens, the 9,828m2 parcel of land was returned to the public as part of the Q150 celebrations. The  catalogue outlining the public art within the park is downloadable here 

Nestled on the edge of the Kangaroo Point cliffs, the new park provides a unique environment for visitors and residents with its panoramic vistas, green spaces and recreation areas. Designed as a place for people to enjoy all year round, key features of the new park include a pedestrian loop, café, shaded BBQ areas and five public artworks.

Of the five artworks, two (Afforest and The Green Room) are organic or green installations while the third untitled - wormholes.2010 is a snaking tubular frame that invites interaction. The fourth installation Seven Versions of the Sun is a series of viewing platforms perched on the edge of the Kangaroo Point Cliffs, each with special solar effects. The fifth and largest work, Venus Rising by UK artist Wolfgang Buttress was commissioned following a public poll. The artist is currently working with a team of engineers with the design expected to be completed in early 2011.

To see more about these projects, view the 'Kangaroo Point' video on AQ TV  or download the catalogue Art of the Park

Venus Rising - Wolfgang Buttress
Venus Rising was installed at Kangaroo Point Park on 19 January 2012. The artist and engineers worked to create the best possible vision for this major sculpture, destined to become an iconic marker for Queensland. Its slender torpedo shape is based on the Fibonacci spiral. Illuminated from the base, Venus Rising is a visible marker on the Brisbane skyline. Watch a BBC interview with the artist and see how Venus Rising took shape at:

http://www.capturepr.co.uk/wolfgang_buttress140911.html

The Green Room - Nicole Voevodin-Cash
The Green Room is a land-art work that not only refers to the chill out space in a theatre but also to the term used by surfers to describe being inside the barrel of wave and this beach culture reference is even further accentuated by the large purple umbrellas to be sited on the wave-like contour mounds. For the opening event, the umbrellas will open like flowers over a meadow and provide the small intimate spaces to enjoy the views and the city as theatre. From above this work looks like a ripple in the land and it reminds us that even the smallest idea or action sends a ripple out into the world and 150 years ago our independence from NSW resonated and grew to allow us to be a strong and independent state.

Afforest - Nicole Voevodin-Cash
Afforest establishes a forest on previously unforested land and consists of three indigenous pine species, a timber tree and a flowering tree, all from the dry rainforest areas surrounding Brisbane. It provides a curving arbour walk covered in ‘the Queen’s Wreath’ or purple ‘Petrea’ meandering its way through the last two avenues of trees, crossing it like a DNA strand, further emphasising the trees as the DNA or life force of the site. Afforest creates a space which people can move through and under. Acting like a giant tunnel of nature, it joins a series of spaces or rooms which are highlighted at three entry points with ‘shaped’ (espaliered) trees that will feature red flowering tops. This artwork recognises how a park can change naturally through the seasons or by human intervention. 

untitled - wormholes.2010 - Alexander Knox
The sculpture and sound environment untitled - wormholes.2010 was conceived as a sort of tactile time machine where people (especially children) can discover the site and its histories through a combination of free form exploratory play and immersion in a historically evocative soundscape. In physics, a wormhole is a hypothetical topological feature of space-time that acts a shortcut through space and time. Knox says he was attracted by the seemingly childlike simplicity of the worm holes concept and the magical idea that time travel could take place through special holes in time and space.

Seven Versions of the Sun - Daniel Boyd
Seven Versions of the Sun is an art piece integrated into seven arbours via seven highly polished screens laser-cut to create motifs of the sun. The art pieces are created to cast shadows on the landscape, illuminated by the sunlight flooding through the negative space, projecting motifs of the sun inside the cast shadow. Forming a visual connection to the trajectory of the sun, the motifs are there to trigger people’s awareness of seasons, following the position of the earth’s rotational axis.