Notes on Sydenham

33 plaques of Agatha Gothe-Snape’s Notes on Sydenham spill out across Sydenham Station plaza entrances, stairs, paths, and seats.

Public art at Sydenham Station, Notes on Sydenham by Agatha Gothe-Snape, features 33 cast bronze drawings.

Each is inscribed with notes of conversations between the artist and Sydenham locals.

A bronze plaque is folded over a terrace step of Sydenham station. The plaque has raised drawing, a text map of short paragraphs connecting to other paragraphs.

Notes on Sydenham, Agatha Gothe-Snape, 2021. Bronze. 33 parts, each 297 x 420 mm. Sydenham Station Metro Plazas.

About the artwork

Agatha Gothe-Snape’s artwork Notes on Sydenham features 33 cast bronze drawings inscribed with notes of conversations between the artist, and Sydenham Station regulars.

The artwork performs a moment when a folder has spilled open. The wind captures its contents, scattering drawings across the station plazas.

It is one of 18 station artworks commissioned for the Sydney Metro Art program on the City & Southwest line.

You can read about many other public art projects in the Metro Art Program here.

The terrace gardens of Sydenham station include seats and landscaping. Two bronze plaques of artwork Notes on Sydenham are folded over stairs, one neatly in half, and one angled as if blown by the wind.

“‘These stories were recorded in the knowledge that they took take place on the traditional lands of the Cadigal and neighbouring Kameygal peoples, whose stories run much deeper and for countless generations,” Gothe-Snape says.

In 2020 and 2021, Gothe-Snape invited people with long-term connections to Sydenham to participate in the artwork.

Fifteen locals generously agreed to share their stories in one-on-one conversations with the artist.

Gothe-Snape recorded the conversations she shared with the 15 participants with pen on paper.

The ‘notes’ are informal and personal stories of individuals negotiating life’s passages, in and around Sydenham, in the 20th and 21st centuries.

Each text drawing is a text-map of the flow of a conversation.

The 15 conversations and their residue, in the form of text maps, were then cast in bronze.

Some conversations are contained in a single bronze drawing, other conversations are spread across several.

Gothe-Snape describes each bronze text drawing as having its own shape and creative dynamic. They are fragmentary and full of imperfections.

33 bronze text drawings were created, either folded or flat.

The plaques have been placed in the two entrance plazas of the metro station.

Gothe-Snape says “these beautiful bronze drawings provide a fine-grained, tactile element in a context of otherwise endless movement: rushing, catching, missing, waiting.”

Artist statement

Notes on Sydenham is a hand-drawn, conversation-driven monument built from the stories of individuals who have lived, worked or regularly passed through Sydenham and its surrounds for a significant part of their lives.

The artwork exists in 33 parts, integrated into the landscape at the Sydney Metro entrances to Sydenham Station, 11 on the Southern Plaza and 22 on the Northern Plaza.

Sydenham Station plaza during construction and installation of Notes on Sydenham. A group of people in orange high-visibility clothing crouch around Notes on Sydenham looking at plaques and drawings.

The bronze text drawings are fragmentary and full of imperfections. They record anecdotes about Sydenham and its surrounding suburbs unfiltered by the concerns of official narratives. Each drawing captures a single conversation.

In 2020-2021, Gothe-Snape invited individuals with long-term connections to the area, including residents and business owners from a wide range of backgrounds, to participate in the artwork.

15 one-on-one conversations took place between the artist and the local participants who generously agreed to contribute their stories.

Some of these conversations are presented in a single bronze drawing, and others are represented in several bronze drawings across the two plazas.

Notes on Sydenham contains informal and personal stories, of growing up, starting businesses, favourite places, friends, family, immigration and creativity – jotted down, and framed by the enthusiasms and dilemmas of individuals negotiating life’s passages, in and around Sydenham, in the 20th and 21st centuries.

These stories are recorded in the knowledge that they took take place on the traditional lands of the Cadigal and neighbouring Kameygal peoples, whose stories run much deeper and for countless generations.

The stories were recorded by Gothe-Snape as pen drawings on A3 sheets of paper. Each drawing has its own shape and creative dynamic. Notes on Sydenham exists as both the 15 improvised conversations and their residue in the form of text maps cast in bronze.

As if a folder had spilled open and its contents were blown by the wind, the 33 drawings are scattered across the station landscape.

In the recording in writing of informal verbal conversations, and the transition from paper to bronze, and the cementing in place of wind-scattered bronze pages, Notes on Sydenham presents a passage from the ephemeral to the permanent, from quick transit to slowing down.

Gothe-Snape’s bronze drawings provide a fine-grained, tactile element in a context of otherwise endless movement: rushing, catching, missing, waiting.

The format and processes of Notes on Sydenham echo Gothe-Snape’s earlier, iconic work Every Artist Remembered (2011-2017), examples of which are held in the Cruthers Collection of Women’s Art at the University of Western Australia, Monash University Museum of Art and the Museum of Contemporary Art Australia.

Artist biography

Agatha Gothe-Snape’s art explores the complexities and poetics of language and the physical space around us.

She identifies these locations as where, both as individuals and collectively, we embody knowledge, and where our relationships with each other, with art, and histories, are created, performed and negotiated.

Underpinned by her background in performance, Gothe-Snape’s work operates intuitively and is often generated via improvisation, collaboration and through conversation. Her artworks use text to find shortcuts through complexity and ambiguity to arrive at fertile slippages of meaning. She weds emotional impact with conceptual rigor at the thresholds where our relationships with the rest of the world take place.

Gothe-Snape’s Notes on Sydenham commissioned by Transport for NSW is one of several major public artworks by the artist.

Others include:

The Noblest (2018 – 2021), 115 Bathurst Street, Sydney
Here, an Echo (2017), Wemyss Lane, Sydney and
The Scheme was a Blueprint for Future Development Programs (2015), Monash University Caulfield Campus, Melbourne.

Notes on Sydenham participants: