On Thursday 10 March at Juniper Hall Paddington, the 2022 winners of the Tom Bass Prize for Figurative Sculpture were announced by Sydney Contemporary Director Barry Keldoulis…

“It was always with a feeling of excitement that I would turn off the Broadway, busy with traffic, into a small laneway leading to the door of the Tom Bass Sculpture Studio. There was a repair shop for fridges and whitegoods on the ground floor and I seem to remember perhaps a jeweller or a goldsmith in the building as well…”

“Here in this Studio I could make concrete my daydreams and hold my own against the roar and thunder of the city and the sadness and loss I was experiencing at that time. Tom’s teaching looked seriously at free play of imagination, contemplation and dreaming. There was no radio or noise apart from the soft sounds of students at work in this boundless silence, three floors up off Broadway…”

“As you stepped into the light-filled entry way, you climbed up the square timber stairwell to the top floor and entered another world!  The tall windows lined the walls and streamed dust-light into the room, while the window pane shadows moved across the floor throughout the day…” 

Conceived as "the spirit of the community", the sculpture is a representation of a graceful yet triumphant winged figure with arms raised above her head to receive a descending dove of peace and beauty…

“The P&O Wall Fountain ‘bit’ into the Hunter Street building, making it one of Australia’s greatest public sculptures...”

When The University of Sydney commissioned ‘The Student’ from Tom Bass in 1953, it became the university’s earliest modernist public artwork…

Today we bring you some wonderful pictures of Tom Bass AM creating “The Falconer”, electrolytic copper, 1955…