Grief Ramp, 2025

aluminium steel sheets, scaffolding, Borax crystals grown on cotton

and glass μάτι, plaster cast from live equine hooves, speakers,

concrete.

2120.0 x 650.0 x 990.0 cm

Artist: Tina Stefanou

Original sculpture design and crystal dressing: Romanie Harper

Project manager and sculpture fabricator: Ellen Sayers

Fabrication: Richard Brownlee

3D design and installer: Glen Clancey

Scaffolding: Aaron Ellis (Super Safe Hire)

Consulting producer: Anna Nalpantidis

Commissioned by Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, Melbourne

with support from Creative Australia, Arts House and Yamaha

Grief Ramp 2025 is a monumental sculpture in the shape of a stunt

ramp, soaring across the gallery from floor to ceiling. Inspired by

the artist’s collaborator Matthew Cassar’s journey of riding dirt bikes

while blind, including his ambition to achieve the world’s highest jump.

The work literally and metaphorically (scaff)holds notions of trust,

protection, and transformation, as well as the dizzying heights of

neoliberal aspiration or the feeling of free falling.

What happens after the jump?

What will catch us?

Stefanou turns the sculpture into a living instrument as speakers

are placed within the scaffold, vibrating and pulsing to the

soundtrack of the accompanying film, You Can’t See Speed

2025. Rumbling along the ramp are the heavy industrial sounds

of dirt bikes and low frequencies merged with melismatic singing,

trumpets, and voice. A sensorium of abiotic, musical, and bodily

compositions.

A waterfall of hand-grown crystals cascade from the ramp’s peak,

crying collective tears of loss or yearning. Stefanou writes, ‘It is in

grief, in salty residues, that crystallisation begins’. Embedded with

ornamented evil eyes, Grief Ramp also acts as a totemic ribbon,

protecting against and warding off threats both imagined and

real. As Cassar becomes the evil eye totem in the film, Stefanou

transfers that protection from the screen to the space, fortifying all

of us within an embrace of metal, crystal, and sound.

Previous
Previous

Field of Triggers: Agritemple

Next
Next

Days in Doreen (workshop for a singer and mechanic)