Monuments for Fishes: Mikala Dwyer unveils major floating artwork in Sydney Harbour

One of the largest floating and kinetic artworks in the world has been unveiled in Watermans Cove at Barangaroo South. Monuments for Fishes by Mikala Dwyer marks the culminating commission in Lendlease and Infrastructure NSW’s Public Art and Cultural Plan for Barangaroo — a program that has shaped the precinct over more than a decade.

The large-scale work features five sculptural monuments rising to 23 metres above sea level from the harbour, inspired by lightweight fishing floats and paying homage to Indigenous fisherwomen. Crafted from carbon fibre, fibreglass and steel — the same materials used to build yachts — the monuments respond to their surrounding environment, swaying with the tides, winds and currents, and resonating with the changing light and reflections across the water.

Dwyer created the work in collaboration with Event Engineering, drawing on more than 100 specialists to design and build it in Australia, including engineers, shipwrights, spray-painters, steel welders and machinists.

For Dwyer, the monumental grew from the intimate. The work began with a simple striped fishing float sitting in her studio, small enough to hold in her hand. Scaled up at Watermans Cove, the gathering of buoyant forms becomes, in her words, a barometer of the harbour’s energy cycles — a tribute to the fisherwomen who worked these waters and to the sea life beneath.

Lendlease Art Advisory Panel member Nicholas Baume described the piece as an extraordinarily complex creative challenge made to look like a walk on water. Conceived for a site layered with human history and use, the work draws on a contemporary form of recreation once vital to the sustenance of the Cammeraygal woman Barangaroo and her people, transforming the humble yet elegantly engineered fishing float into a vibrant and majestic gathering of playfully bobbing forms.

Daniel Baxter, Executive Director of Development for NSW/ACT, noted that the work reflects the character and history of Sydney Harbour and adds another layer to how people experience Barangaroo. Its unveiling completes a public art program that has delivered five permanent artworks across more than a decade, contributing to a culturally rich precinct.

Over the past 11 years, the program has delivered four other permanent public artworks under the Barangaroo Public Art and Culture Plan: Shellwall by Esme Timbery with Jonathan Jones in 2015; Shadows by German artist Sabine Hornig in 2019; Mermer Waiskeder: Stories of the Moving Tide by the Ghost Net Collective — Indigenous and non-Indigenous artists from Erub in the Torres Strait, Cairns and Townsville — in 2023; and Upside-Down Garden by Jumaadi in 2025. Several temporary works featured across the initiative, including Art Ninjas by Nobumasa Takahashi in 2016; As the Crow Flies by Reko Rennie in 2017; Art Month Hoardings by Rennie, Tony Albert, Karen Black and Joan Ross in 2017; and Naabami (thou shall/will see): Barangaroo (army of me) by Brenda Croftin 2023.

All works have been delivered under the joint NSW Government and Lendlease Public Art and Cultural Plan for Barangaroo, which guides the commissioning and management of public art across the precinct for Infrastructure NSW, Lendlease and Barangaroo’s development partners.

Monuments for Fishes is now on permanent public display in Watermans Cove at Barangaroo South.