Slate pool walkway

As part of the Gallery’s 1996 extension, South Australian craftsperson Catherine Truman was commissioned by the then Director, Ron Radford, to create an installation for the western entrance. Fondly known as the ’fish gates’, the Slate pool walkway installation features two gates, whose structure mimics a fish net, while the walkway itself is paved with a ’pool’ of slate from Mintaro, in the Mid-North of South Australia. Central to Truman’s concept are the bronze fish trapped in the net, on top of the net and emerging from the paved slate pool. Truman’s original proposal suggested that pedestrians would experience the sense of ’walking on water’ as they moved through the passageway and that the work ’alludes to water as an important source of life, to voyages and journeys, past and present’.

Rebecca Evans, Curator of Decorative Arts & Design