Wheel of the Ingredients

Wind Contrivance

Pauline Fraser

Bronze, Red Gum and Harcourt granite sculpture, 1995

Queen Victoria Market, Therry Street 

Pauline Fraser was born in 1953 on remote Christmas Island. She studied sculpture at Monash University and RMIT, and has exhibited her work widely in Australia. In 1994, the City of Melbourne commissioned Fraser to undertake Wind Contrivance through its Percent for Art Program. The work was sculpted in Fraser’s studio at Lurg, 20 kilometres from Benalla, and cast at the Meridian Foundry in Fitzroy. 

This large bronze sculpture – featuring an array of vegetables, fish and an Aboriginal fishing net – looks whimsically to the relationship between the land and city, tradition and lifestyle, production and consumption. Like Bernice Murphy’s Dairy Hall Window, with which it was unveiled in August 1996, Wind Contrivance is sited at Queen Victoria Market, a centre point between land and city, and a cipher through which the country harvest is distributed to city dwellers.