
2023
Piara Waters Secondary College
Percent for Art: Facade Screen
Daniel Giuffre, Rick Vermey
Department of Finance
With_ Architecture
Capital House Engineering
5.5m x 3.5m x 3.3m, 2.1m x 1.5m x 1.4m, 1.4m x 1.1m x 1.1m
Painted steel, coloured concrete and lighting
$342,000
Kilmore Group
Three painted sculptures at three stages of bloom, rising, prospering, flourishing, growing across the campus like the students who pass them.
An inflorescence is the botanical term for a complete flowering head, and in a banksia it is a quiet marvel: what reads as one bloom is in truth hundreds of individual flowers, gathered on a single spike and opening together. Inflorescence brings that idea to Piara Waters Senior High School as a family of three brightly painted sculptures, and as a metaphor it could not fit a school more closely: many individuals, one flowering body.
The work returns to the school where Anthesis, the Stage 1 artwork, wrapped the twin stair towers in banksia colour. In the years since, something unusual happened: the school adopted the artwork into its own identity, its logo drawn from the helix of the cylindrical stairwell, its official vision describing the upward spiral as the pathway that takes every student into the future. Art shaped the school's brand; Stage 2 now grows from that brand in return. The helix, a symbol of resilience found throughout nature and, for the school, of connection to land, water and culture, spirals upward through the new sculptural forms.
The three sculptures are one work at three ages. The small courtyard sculpture is Junior, rising; the mid-size sculpture is Middle School, prospering; the large civic landmark at the theatre entry is Senior, flourishing. Placed along the campus's sightlines and pathways, from the English and Maths courtyard through the Arts forecourt to the public face on Mason Road, they map the journey toward maturity onto the ground the students cross every day, each form a stage further into bloom.
Conceptually the family continues the celebration of the swampy woodland that once thrived on this site, a low open woodland of twenty six recorded native species: Banksia attenuata and Banksia menziesii, Xanthorrhoea preissii, casuarinas, nuytsias and melaleucas. The flowering banksia that inspired the stairway artworks continues to inform these sculptural forms, its vivid spikes translated into cylindrical geometries of lasercut, cut-out sheet metal in multiple gloss hues, with visible, colour matched fixings. The kinship with Stage 1 is deliberate and legible: same bold colour, same cut sheet construction, same cylindrical logic, so that old and new artworks read as one continuing story of place.
Together, the family creates a cohesive artistic statement of community: interconnected, rooted in shared history, and fostering belonging. Aligned with the school's vision, where every student has a pathway to success, Inflorescence gives that pathway a physical form, three flowerings at three scales, growing across the campus the way a cohort grows through a school.










