Walk the Line

Joe Sheehan

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Wellington City Walk Map View
“The Cenotaph site has always felt like a transitional space to me, a space between...This sense of movement, change and reflection will be echoed in the work...The two parts working together but at different times of the day. During busier times the soundscape will slip into the background and the visual element will come into focus, the dotted line drawing people through the site. Then in the early morning, the evening, and at night, as the visual elements drop back the sounds will go to work, ghosting into the space during the quieter, more reflective moments of the day.” 

The Wellington Sculpture Trust commissioned Walk the Line, a sculpture by artist Joe Sheehan, within the Cenotaph Memorial precinct, Wellington, to mark the historic Wai Piro Stream.

The work was included in the redesign of the precinct to mark the original bed of the stream which once flowed down what is now Bowen Street across the precinct to the nearby foreshore. The stream was culverted many years ago and is now running below Bowen Street, Lambton Quay and Whitmore Street.

With Joe’s installation the old path of the Wai Piro Stream is marked by 231 carved jade discs, meandering as a ‘stream’ through the precinct. They are carved from a range of Nephrite types sourced from the West Coast of New Zealand, Australia, Canada, Russia, Mongolia and China. Almost all the pieces have been collected by the artist over the past 15 years.

Running under the discs is a below-ground speaker system providing the sound of a running stream, all recorded from several stretches of water around e Ahumairangi/Mt Tinakori which feed the Wai Piro stream.

2015
231 carved jade discs, speaker units
Cenotaph Precinct, Bowen Street
With funding from the Wellington City Council, Wellington Community Trust, Creative New Zealand, LT McGuinness, Collin Post and many more.