Jumaadi, Upside-Down Garden, 2025. Courtesy the artist and Lendlease. Image: Mark Pokorny.
ArtsHub’s Thomas Sargeant interviewed multidisciplinary, Indonesian-Australian artist Jumaadi about his recent public sculpture commission at Barangaroo, called Upside-Down Garden. Thomas writes that ‘Upside-Down Garden by Jumaadi turns corporate Sydney on its head’.
Jumaadi told ArtsHub he drew on the area’s ‘complex history’ in developing Upside-Down Garden, infused with his own thematic concerns of migration and hybrids between human and nature.
‘(Barangaroo) has a precolonial history with natural history and also a lot of social history taking place, including the current function of the harbour as an economic hub for Australia,’ he said.
‘As a starting point, we were thinking of the natural history and imagined that if we tipped the harbor upside-down we would have found the shape without the water. If you imagine the sea bed was above us, then those things that are hanging are either natural or archeological remains.’
Upside-Down Garden bridges these human and natural worlds in its placement and its themes, inviting viewers to look up and reimagine the space from a different angle.
The piece itself ‘sits in proximity to other public artwork in the region, including Esme Timbery and Jonathan Jones’s large-scale Shellwall (2015), German artist Sabine Horning’s Shadows (2019) and Mermer Waiskeder: Stories of the Moving Tide by Ghost Net Collective (2023).
