Australia lands its first Yayoi Kusama ‘Pumpkin’

For those of you who have been out to Pt. Leo Estate Sculpture Park on the Mornington Peninsula in Victoria, you’ll know that it is a pretty magical experience. Set against a backdrop of rolling vineyards with the ocean beyond and distant views out to Western Port Bay and Phillip Island, it is a windswept outdoor art wonderland. The park contains some of the world’s most coveted works of contemporary art – over 50 mainly large-scale sculptures in fact.

In its latest high-profile acquisition, the Sculpture Park is “thrilled to announce [it] has acquired a red and black Pumpkin. At three-metres wide, the monumental work is much larger than [Yayoi] Kusama’s iconic Naoshima sculpture and enjoys a spectacular Victorian coastal vista as backdrop,” according to Pt. Leo Sculpture Park consultant curator, Geoffrey Edwards.

Kusama’s world-famous pumpkins are odes to the artist’s childhood experience living on a small farm imagining that she was lost in a field of flowers that began to speak to her. The massed flower heads resembled the dots that became an obsession for the mature artist, who had drawn pumpkins from a young age and decades later became a recurrent motif in her multidisciplinary practice.

Kusama’s pumpkins are created larger than life in bronze, mosaic and stainless steel, with apertures often cut out of their surfaces to create dot-patterns that play with light and shadow. “A polka dot has the form of the sun…a symbol of the energy of the whole world and our living life, and also the form of the moon, which is calm,” says Kusama. “Round, soft, colourful, senseless and unknowing, Polka dots become movement… Polka dots are  a way to infinity.” Kusama also admires the ‘humility and comfort’ of the form of the pumpkin  itself.

“I am very pleased to showcase my work in such a wonderful place. The magical fusion of nature and my work is something special that can only be seen in each location,” says Kusama.

Visitors to Pt. Leo Estate can visit the work from this Saturday, 25 November. Soon to be announced are different tributes to the Kusama aesthetic that will form part of the Point Leo Estate Experience.

Yayoi Kusama
yayoi-kusama.jp

Pt. Leo Estate
ptleoestate.com.au

Photography
Chris McConville