The Alexander Heights resident has spent ‘hundreds of hours’ sanding and interlocking metal elements for her first sculpture, Cultural complexities of a wandering spirit.
This is her first time in the Cottesloe exhibition and Addam said it was a step towards her goal of being an architectural sculptor after more than a decade of creating ‘wearable art pieces’.
‘I make sculptural jewellery,’ she said.
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READ NOW‘I do make a lot of jewellery and I’m moving into sculptures as well.
‘I would like to do public artworks.’
Addam said she had been working on the concept for a while, trying to discover her ‘sense of place’ in the overlap between Egypt and Australia.
She said spinifex had been prevalent in her childhood and adult life and she had chosen a design extracted from Islamic-Arabesque art.
‘With this piece, I picked out an element and magnified, replicated and made it three-dimensional,’ she said.
The sculptor said several businesses had helped her create the piece, including Total Sheet Metal, Unique Metals and Laser, Camera Dynamics and Austral Wright Metals.
‘It’s really important for artists to have support from industry and I think I have been really lucky,’ she said.
‘I’ve had these elements laser cut; I’ve gone through sanding all the edges.
‘There’s so many of them ” it’s time-consuming.
It’s all a bit of trial and error; it’s a great learning process. It’s been quite a mammoth task, an interesting journey.’
With Sculpture by the Sea exhibition opening this Friday, Addam said her piece was ‘spiritual’ and people would see whatever they wanted in it.