Location: Burns Bay Road at the corner of Figtree Street, Lane Cove.
Artist James Voller (Collide Public Art) worked with Council's Local History librarians, selecting historical photographs of Lane Cove and using high-end production methods to drag them off the page, rebuilding them as large-scale sculpture - flat records made solid, given weight and scale, and planted back in the ground they came from.
"Three threads run through the images: aviation, ceramics, baking. Air, earth, fire. Things that rise, things shaped by hand, things changed by heat. Together they map a community defined by what it made.
I don't treat the past as a fixed story. I treat it as material - fragments from different trades and decades, cut up and reassembled into new structures. History you can walk around, not just look back on."
Imagined narratives of Lane Cove that inspired the piece:
Aviation
He never spoke much about the desert winds or the way the engine sounded crossing the Timor Sea, but he kept the leather gloves folded in a drawer by the window. Sometimes he’d walk to the rise near the wharf and stand quietly, eyes tracing the sky. People said he had flown farther than most would dare to imagine. They didn’t know about the letter he kept tucked behind a framed photograph: four names, one destination, and a single race that changed his life. He had flown mail routes and reconnaissance, supply drops and storms. The maps he trusted were inked by hand, his compass was always half a second behind the wind. In the local pub, they called him “Captain”, though no one could say why. He never corrected them. When the airstrip closed, he gave his logbooks to the library and stopped talking about the past. But some nights, when the wind shifted inland, he stood by the open door and held the gloves again, feeling, just for a moment, the lift of air beneath him.
Bakery
He lit the ovens before dawn, when the streets still slept and the scent of warm bread drifted down the lanes. The shopfront bore his name in fading paint, but the real memory was in the sourdough starter passed down from his father. After the war, the loaves brought comfort, a silent rhythm of flour and fire. He liked to think each crust told part of the suburb’s story, each customer carrying it home beneath their arm. He knew every customer by name, every child’s preferred bun. His apron bore the same burn mark for thirty years. On Sundays, he saved the best loaves for the nurse at the end of the street, whose shift never allowed her to queue. When the shop finally closed, becoming Old Bakery Gallery instead, people said the morning air had lost something. But the smell lingered in doorways, the recipe written in notebooks, in habit, in hands that still shaped dough the way he had taught them, firm, patient, and never in a rush.
Orchard
He walked the boundary line every morning, boots damp with dew, fingers trailing along the orchard’s low stone fence. The land had been his since the old maps still marked it with creeks and goat tracks. He planted rows of citrus on the slope above Burns Bay, built a timber house facing Penrose Street, and began shaping a life from soil and salt air. The sound of pruning saws, bone mills, and livestock echoed across the land. Over time, the orchard expanded to include a boiling-down works, a piggery, and eventually, a dairy. At its peak, it spanned thirty acres and supplied much of Lane Cove’s milk and cream, with two daily deliveries and shipments to the city.
When he stood in council chambers, collar stiff, the orchard was still on his mind—how to keep it growing, how to shape something lasting from soil and sweat. He was as firm in civic life as he was on the land, remembered for his fairness, but also for the occasional outburst. He once overturned an ink pot and a table in the heat of debate! Neighbours remembered the sound of his pruning saw, the steady beat of work that shaped the trees into order. He measured time in harvests, in pests endured and rains hoped for.. Later, when development crept closer and the trees began to vanish one by one, a single row was kept alive behind the shed. Just enough for jam. Just enough to remember.
Pottery
She found the fine, red-brown clay near Burns Bay, tucked under leaf litter and creekbend. Her hands were always marked, thumbprints, glazes, and the faint burns of kiln work. The seasons moved in and out through the open windows of her shed, and the kiln hissed and cooled in time with them. Each pot was a slow rebellion against speed: nothing was rushed, nothing made the same twice.
Locals brought her broken tiles and river-worn stone, sometimes old shards from their gardens, sometimes fragments rumoured to come from Phoenix Street itself. The suburb, once home to the Phoenix Pottery Company, had long been shaped by clay. On that street, kilns once fired Toby Jugs, glazed teapots, colourful money boxes, and sanitary ware, supplying much of Sydney with both the beautiful and the necessary. Pottery Green, just nearby, still carried the name of that early industry.
She worked differently, never on a wheel, always with her hands. Cups that didn’t match, bowls shaped like memories. Children watched for her at the weekend markets, drawn by the woman with clay beneath her nails and smudges across her cheek. In her cluttered shed, offcuts mingled with moss, and out back, a firepit smoked with the scent of ash and glaze.
Once, she carved a full tea set with the imprint of river stones across the base, like water had passed through and left its trace. Her work travelled across the suburb, anonymous but unmistakable. No marks, no stamps. “The clay remembers enough,” she’d say, brushing dust from her palms. And it did, holding in its curves the texture of place, the story of a street, and the quiet, shaping hands that never hurried.