Briggs’ Lanterns—Public Artwork

Before I could imagine what Briggs’ Lanterns might become, I needed to understand the place where it would live.

Developed through an artist mentorship with Urban Art Projects (UAP), an international public art and design organisation, in partnership with Artisan, Queensland’s leading organisation for contemporary craft and design, the temporary public artwork grew from my research into Brisbane’s historic Tank Street Precinct and the people who had lived and worked there.

As I followed the history of the area, certain things began to surface: boarding houses and domestic life; drapers, tailors and textile merchants; furniture, fabric and pattern. One of those businesses was J Briggs & Sons, a drapery store that operated at 428 George Street from around 1917 to 1951, backing onto the lane where the work would eventually be installed—and from which Briggs’ Lanterns took its name.

The history began to find its way into the form of the work.

Victorian-era dining chairs became the starting point for the sculptural forms. Their familiar outlines were enlarged and transformed into nine illuminated structures, while patterned fabric referenced the textiles once sold and worked with in the surrounding streets.

Installed along Briggs Lane, the forms sat somewhere between furniture and lantern. During the day they read as patterned sculptural objects; at night, light from within illuminated the fabric and changed their presence in the lane.

What began as research into a place became a way of returning something to it—not by reconstructing its history, but by allowing fragments of that history to reappear in another form.