Carriageworks Pavilion

Exploring the great working class tradition of production at the Everleigh locomotive works in Redfern, Sydney.

• Investigators

  • • Professor Callum Morton
    Monash Art, Design and Architecture

• Co-investigators

  • Andre Bonnice

• Funded by

  • Carriageworks

• Undertaken within

  • Monash Art Projects

Our shortlisted submission to the Carriageworks pavilion competition was made up of a number of options that all explored the great working class tradition of production at the Everleigh locomotive works in Redfern, Sydney which was once the largest locomotive production workshop in the world. These various attempts explored the materiality of steel and it’s manipulation, in particular we attempted to freeze a form that captured its material transformation from molten liquid to hardened steel.

One of the options included here was an optically shifting block made of spaced steel sheets, the interior and opening of which were formed by subtracting a series of furnaces that still remain in the disused workshops today. Others used the form of an upside down steel ladle/dome with a molten interior roof and a large block of Sydney sandstone that seemed to have been burnt out at the core.