Art Blesses Travellers

Brisbane-based artist Sebastian Moody’s most exciting and ambitious public artwork to date has just been ‘switched on’ at the Brisbane International Terminal by the Brisbane Airport Corporation.  Moody’s text-based work Keep the Sunshine dominates the Goodbye Wall of the newly refurbished Terminal, and it will provide a contemporary travel blessing for millions of departing travellers each year. As Courier-Mail Arts Editor Phil Brown suggests ”Moody … is a talented artist who has been making his mark on the city, literally”.

Sunshine is a metaphor for life, vibrancy, health, goodness, and positivity. When we say goodbye to our friends, family and loved ones, we do so with our best intentions, respect and kindness. With this clever and upbeat gesture, the artist has created a new way of saying goodbye. The artwork is a meditation on what can be kept and what must be declared when we are leaving or returning home. In this way, Brisbane is making a positive declaration first—farewelling you with friendliness, warmth, respect, kindness and humour.

Moody’s reputation as a practitioner has been steadily growing through previous public art commissions, such as Built Under the Sun (2002) and Think Bigger (2009), which have already invited the adjective ‘iconic’. But Keep the Sunshine seems to be a breakthrough work in his career, making a truly justifiable claim to the secular declarative, ‘iconic’. Queenslanders are fond of both their secular declaratives and their icons—genuine or otherwise. The (self-proclaimed) Sunshine State abounds in solar abundance, and Moody’s laid-back humour lays the implied natural resource on in thick, self-deprecating humour as we would lather our bodies with protective sunscreen on a hot summer’s day.

Both our envious outdoor lifestyle and our renowned hospitality are our in-built self-protection to the harmful rays of cynicism and despondency. Moody’s gesture of ubiquitous generosity underscores his developing mastery of re-phrasing authority and civic ownership. With Keep the Sunshine, Moody chooses to mine our natural resource in a way that is freely sustainable and unchallenged. The gift is magnanimous and seemingly in perpetuity—located in ‘the world’s most liveable airport’.

As Moody suggests to the Courier Mail, “It’s a positive message. Public art has, I think, a responsibility to do something positive. If I’m messing with anyone’s head I’m doing it in a good way”.

Congratulations to Sebastian Moody, Brisbane Airport Corporation, Richards and Spence, Arkhefield, UAP, mc/k art consulting and all of the contributors and collaborators who worked on this project.

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