Michael Parekōwhai’s public sculpture The World Turns 2011–12 was commissioned to commemorate the fifth anniversary of the Gallery of Modern Art (GOMA) and the twentieth anniversary of the Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art, and is now part of the Gallery’s Collection. A warm, witty outdoor sculpture that is at once crowd-pleasing and provocative, it comprises a five-metre elephant bookend turned on its side, attended by a nonchalant kuril, the native marsupial water rat so significant to the dreaming of local Aboriginal people. At the periphery of the stretch of lawn that the sculpture occupies — between GOMA, the State Library and the mangroves lining the Brisbane River — stands a solitary chair. All three are cast in bronze.

Beyond its participation in dialogues surrounding the profound historical and cultural significance of the site on which the Cultural Centre now sits, the work can certainly be admired for its finish and verisimilitude. But it could also be argued that slightly more technical sculptural terms add another layer of judgement and interpretation. For the visual tension in The World Turns is indeed impressive: its play of mass and line, of spatial enclosure and adroit ocular stewardship, the way the eye is guided so smoothly over the sculpture’s contours amidst a catalogue of contrasts — of scale and disposition, of positive and negative space, of the work’s constituent bronze against its verdant ground. The elephant’s forehead appears to be pressing obstinately into the earth, not only because of the direction of its gait, but also because of the weight that the structure implies. Parekōwhai is a sculptor at the height of his powers.

The significance of this technical assessment is not merely formal; it provides a way of reading the relationship between the work’s protagonists. The elephant, a symbol of Afro-Asian exoticism in the European imagination, continues its useless labour, while the Indigenous kuril grooms itself nearby. It is possible to see their contrasting attitudes as repeating the rhythm of oppositions constructed by traditional sculptural criticism. But a third figure haunts the scene: the empty chair at the edge of the green. This marks the place of the viewer, the third party who complicates binary views of the world, whose acts of sensing and thinking ensure that the relationship has a witness, and that in bearing witness it becomes public. The world may turn, but so do the dynamics of our interactions, our ways of being in the world. In public space, the meanings we draw from experience and our judgments of the actions of others will shift and change with time and discussion. The World Turns has already provoked much conversation. May it continue to do so.