The Underneath

Colourful tiled murals in Sydney Metro Gadigal Station

• Investigators

  • • Professor Callum Morton
    Artist

• Co-investigators

  • • Jen Berean
    • Aaron Robinson
    • Paul Van Herk

• Partner Organisations

  • • Belcastro Design
    • Bollinger + Grohmann
    • CPB Constructions
    • Event Engineering
    • Winsor Fireform LLC

• Funded By

  • • Sydney Metro

• Undertaken within

  • Monash Art Projects

The Underneath consists of two saturated tiled images of a tunnel turning a corner into the distance. There are particular features of moving through underground station systems that are interesting as physical experiences as much as visual ones. For instance, you hear the rumble or feel the breeze of a train before seeing it, and often its direction is unclear. Is it coming or going?  In a similar way these two murals of a turning tunnel don’t define whether the train is leaving or departing, both could be entrances as much as they are exits, points of arrival as much as departure, and in this sense they echo the movement of the commuters in and out of the station.

The idea of making an image of a tunnel emerged from a range of places. There is the obvious one given the context of the work inside a new train station and historically the form reflects some of the early railway tunnels in NSW, such as those at Woy Woy and Glenbrook. There is also the image of the tunnel in film and animation, in particular Wile E. Coyote’s fake tunnels that the Road Runner could always miraculously pass through. Most significantly however is the existence of the Tank Stream, the former fresh water tributary that originated from a swamp in Hyde Park and worked its way down this part of the city and out at Sydney Cove. Originally a water supply, food source and wetland for the Gadigal people, it later became an early major source of water for the new colony as well as a line dividing the settlement between the government and administrative class and the convict class. With the building of other water supplies such as Busby’s Bore, the stream became a sewer until finally forming a part of the storm water system, which it remains until this day.