The Divisive White Line At Bondi’s 2024 Sculpture By The Sea Exhibition
Image: White Line Therapy Sculpture by the Sea. Images: Supplied
One piece of art at this year’s Sculpture By The Sea exhibition that has been the subject of much public scrutiny is White Line Therapy, a white line that divides the path (and opinion) along the full length of the exhibition.
The work is the brainchild of Nate Don, a commercial artist who has spent the last 10 years producing design and branding for a number of major businesses.
“This is the first time I’ve done anything professionally artistic,” says Don. “This is the first real accomplishment that’s unique to my own life, which feels really nice.”
The journey from inspiration to completion has been anything but nice, however. It began at last year’s Sculpture By The Sea, when Don, who is a local to the area, was on one of his regular runs along the coastal path and collided with an inattentive onlooker. Some words were exchanged. Later, when Don was recounting the incident to a friend, he joked that he’d love to draw a line down the middle of the path.
By chance, Don was in a cafe again a few days later when a man walked in wearing a “Sculpture By The Sea” t-shirt. Don shared his line idea and to his surprise, the Sculpture By the Sea team member was impressed and encouraged Don to submit it for the following year’s event.
After procrastinating for almost a year, Don eventually did submit his proposal two minutes before the deadline, but it was a different concept to what was ultimately created.
“[The Sculpture team member] and I had spoken about it being like a racetrack, and we’d have all these different things and like curves and overtaking lanes and all this sort of stuff, so I started to work this up and it was a bit of an overcomplicated concept,” explains Don.
The Sculpture By The Sea committee asked him to resubmit a simpler concept, which he did. It was accepted. Now he had to figure out how to actually do it.
“I hadn’t considered any part of how I was going to achieve this when I first submitted it. I don’t know what the hell I was thinking!” says Don. “This has probably been the hardest seven months of my life.”
He had a site meeting with David Handley and Trent Marwick (Site & Logistics Advisor) who were very enthused about the idea — in fact, they wanted it to be a permanent thing. Waverley Council, at that point, loved the idea. There had recently been a landslide along the coastal path and the council felt this would help direct the foot traffic around it.
“I was told that I essentially solved a problem that they were having without realising it,” says Don.
To ensure that the general public understood it as a Sculpture by the Sea art installation and not the official work of the council, they asked for the line to be wobbly. They also wanted details on Don’s action plan.
“What kind of paint are you gonna use and how are you gonna close the park down? So, we had all these meetings about how I was going to do it. I reached out to 15 different paint companies. I got a response from a guy called Gonz from a company named Carpark King. He was like ‘I love this idea, I really wanna help. How do we do this?’”
They put together a plan that involved closing down the path for a day, blocking off sections and painting the line with a special machine. They submitted it to council and it kicked off a “whole saga” that went back and forth for seven months.
“[It was stuff like] what paint was acceptable. How I was gonna close down the path, what parts can’t I paint on, what parts can I paint on. If I’m gonna do it how long is it gonna last for. How do I ensure it would only last for a bit, but how do I ensure that it just doesn’t disappear straight away.”
Don sorted out all the logistics, walked through it with council and got approval to go ahead. The next day, council called and said they weren’t happy at all with the concept.
“It’s not art. You’re impersonating the council. You’re gonna try and have a simple solution to a complicated problem,” Don said, quoting some comments from a very long, doublespeak email he received. It listed new criteria for the work including things like they wanted the line to be green or blue, it had to have explicit indicators that it was an artwork, the line had to be wavy all the way through, and his descriptive blurb could not contain the words “order”, “chaos”, or any reference to problems with the path.
After weeks of daily communication, Don finally got approval for his work to go ahead — two weeks before the start of Sculpture By The Sea. Then the painting company changed their mind about lending him the machine and instead provided him with spray paint cans and tape. He and a woman called Mandy had to paint the whole 1.2km (closer to 2km if you factor in curves and sidetracks) by hand.
They used tape and salvaged bits of wood as spray shields, and roped in as many family and friends as were willing to help.
Don did ultimately hire a spray machine, but not before he’d used 100 cans of paint. During the ordeal he managed to get sunburnt, covered in mud, blisters, aches all over his body, and was utterly exhausted.
“I would say this is definitely the craziest thing I have ever done in my entire life and I had no concept of it turning into this.”
The response to the artwork from the public has been overwhelmingly positive, with people thanking him for the idea and friends and even other artists congratulating him. Don is particularly blown away by the Sculpture By The Sea team.
“I’ve never met a better group of people in my life, from David at the top down to like the volunteer site people and everybody in between I haven’t had a single bad interaction, I haven’t had a single confrontation or conflict. Every time there’s been an issue, they’ve gone ’Nate, however you wanna do this, you tell us, if we can make it work, we’ll support you.”
And the best thing is, the line works. It has been very effective in regulating the crowd flow and people are really appreciating it.
Until November 4
Bondi to Tamarama coastal walk
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