Emily Floyd

This Place Will Always Be Open was originally commissioned for the Ian Potter Sculpture Courtyard at the Caulfield campus in 2012. Due to the positive reception from staff, students and visitors—who enjoyed the work’s inclusive and welcoming sentiment and playful form—the sculpture was relocated to the Clayton campus in 2014, where it was recently removed temporarily due to building works, and in 2023 at the forecourt of Building 55 where it currently is today.

This Place Will Always Be Open explores the role and legacy of the university campus as a site of political potential. The artwork draws its title and conceptual framework from the history of the student movement at Monash University during the 1960s and ’70s, when students active in the Monash Labor Club opened their new headquarters proclaiming: ‘This place (as soon as it’s fixed up) will always be open for people to drop round and do some revolutionary work.’ Responding to this notion, Floyd’s letters create a series of spaces for discussion, debate and the exchange of ideas.

^{Photo: Andrew Curtis}