Sculpture by the Sea, Cottesloe, founder David Handley celebrates 20 years of the West Coast exhibition

In the inaugural Sculpture by the Sea, Cottesloe, catalogue in 2005, founder David Handley wrote in his director’s note his hope for the exhibition was for the people of Perth to make it their own, turning it into whatever they wanted it to be. Over the course of the following two decades, that is exactly what has happened as Sculpture by the Sea, Cottesloe, celebrates its 20th anniversary exhibition from March 1 to 18 at the scenic WA location. It has been an exhilarating and scary ride for Handley over the years — one that he would not have missed for the world — motivated by an experience the Sydneysider had while living in Prague during his 20s, visiting a sculpture exhibition set among the ruins of a 13th century castle in Klatovy, Northern Bohemia. Having wanted for years to create a free major public event for people to enjoy and feel better about themselves, Handley had finally found just the art form. “Rather than the beautiful architecture or historical ruins of Europe, I thought, ‘What’s so great about Australia? It’s the coast, let’s put sculpture on the coast,’” Handley, who has a background in law, recounts. “I also love the idea of artists as dreamers, not necessarily just sculptors, any artists — painters, singers, musicians, actors — but often they’re not able to realise their own dreams. I wanted to organise something that helped more artists to realise those dreams.” It began in 1997 with Sculpture by the Sea, Bondi, featuring 63 sculptures spread along the Bondi coastal walk, a group of volunteers and a threadbare $11,000 budget, $8,500 of which was to cover artist awards with only $400 allocated for marketing. The exhibition’s success saw sponsor Allens suggest Handley expand to a second location between either Brisbane and Perth, the choice a no-brainer for Handley who had already flagged Cottesloe as an ideal site during a reconnaissance trip in 1997. It would come to be a life-changing decision for Handley in more ways than one, meeting his future wife Kirsten Hay at Sculpture by the Sea, Cottesloe in 2008. “I was so nervous for that first exhibition at Cottesloe in 2005, we didn’t know if the Perth public would go for this in the same way the Sydney public did. It was a quieter site compared to Bondi,” he recalls. “Yet 35,000 people turned up for the eight or nine-day show and it very quickly grew from there to over 100,000 people within a couple of years. Once we got up into those sorts of numbers, you could see that people were coming from right across Perth. Today, we will only have 11 to 13 per cent of our visitors coming from the western suburbs, the vast majority of visitors are coming from greater metropolitan Perth.” The choice of Cottesloe made Sculpture by the Sea a trans-Australia sister exhibition series, featuring sculptures bathed in a sunrise on the east coast and sunset on the west. “I think people in Perth sometimes forget they probably have the best sunsets of any major city in the world,” Handley says. “In my self-appointed role as an ambassador for WA, I love saying that to people all around the world. It’s all about sea, sky, sculpture and sunsets with the images that we get to sell WA to the world and sell the exhibition to the people of WA.” Given this tourism potential and the event’s popularity, it astonishes Handley that he still has to fight for government funding and corporate sponsorship to produce the now more than $2 million-a-year Cottesloe exhibition, resorting in 2020 to start asking exhibition visitors for a $5 donation. Donations collectively add up to $100,000 a year, where their first port of call is to pay the hard costs for artists, including freight bills. “We’re trying to get as much money as we can into artist’s pockets … we would probably be the only major art exhibition in the world where the artists aren’t fully paid for their expenses,” he says. “There’s definitely $500,000 to $750,000 of unfunded work by the artists that make this exhibition possible and about half the artists will lose money to be in the show. That’s the story that doesn’t get told. The story that gets told is ‘wow, Sculpture by the Sea sold $1 million of sculpture’. Well, that’s gone mainly to half a dozen different artists, not to all 70.” Since its first show on the white sands of Cottesloe Beach with 35 sculptures, the exhibition has featured more that 1200 sculptures by more than 500 artists from 44 countries, launching the careers of WA sculptors such as Tania Spencer, Mikaela Castledine and Harry Pannekoek, while pieces like Norton Flavel’s goon bag sculpture Bulk Carrier in 2014 attracted considerable attention. Other established artists from Jennifer Cochrane and Ron Gomboc to Tony Jones and Kevin Draper have supported the event right from the start. “We’ve got artists in the exhibition now who came to the exhibition when they were in primary school, and that experience has led them to be artists or architects or designers,” Handley adds. “A summer holiday coming in between Bondi and Cottesloe is very bad timing, but March is the perfect time of year to do it in Perth. “At 58, installing in the heat of Cottesloe in March is a bit different to doing it in your 30s. I’m not doing the physical labour, I’m just walking around, but I’m getting myself ready to do battle with the heat.” Sculpture by the Sea, Cottesloe, is at Cottesloe Beach, March 1 to 18, featuring the works of over 70 artists from 14 countries.