Twisting aluminium fins wrap the school's stair towers in a banksia bloom — a facade with no moving parts, animated by your own movement.

Anthesis is the botanical term for the moment a flower opens. The artwork wraps the two circular stair towers of Piara Waters Secondary College in a continuous veil of twisting aluminium fins, turning the school's most travelled vertical journeys into a daily encounter with the deeper history of the site.

Piara Waters carries its landscape in its name. Piara is a Noongar word for Banksia attenuata, the candlestick banksia that once grew in open woodland across this ground, while Waters recalls the seasonal wetlands and the vast Jandakot aquifer lying unseen beneath the suburb. The artwork holds both. Its palette is drawn from the flowering spikes of Banksia menziesii, deep reds giving over to honeyed golds, and its patterning moves like light across water.

Each fin is individually rotated, its twist set by a parametric algorithm that propagates a diamond grid across the facade, the same geometry found in the spiralling follicles of a banksia seed pod. From a distance, the screens read as a bold play of positive and negative. Step closer and the image begins to unfix itself.

The true magic of Anthesis lies in its kinetic spirit. Though composed entirely of static aluminium, with no moving parts, the work holds an optical illusion of continuous motion, and it requires the presence of the viewer to be fully realised. As students and staff move past the facade or ascend the stairs, their own motion activates a morphing, kinetic effect: with every stride the fins realign, and the surface ripples and flows. Interplaying with the shifting light and shadow of the passing day, the work echoes the ephemeral, immaterial qualities of the natural world. Like the flowering it is named for, it is never quite the same twice. It opens differently with each hour of light, each season, each passing student.

In a suburb transformed from bushland to streets within a single generation, Anthesis folds the memory of the first landscape into the architecture of the new, not as an image of what was lost but as a living pattern woven into the school's emerging identity.