These weird geometric objects appeared behind a fence on Taylor Square last night.

I walked by on Friday morning, as council workers tore plants out of their planters and pots, and tossed them into the back of their trucks.

They plant those flowers, take them out, plant them, erect new planters, take them away, without any real connection to what’s going on with the plants – they seem pretty healthy. Still, those planters have been strange from the moment they appeared.

I walked past later, at about midnight, and a fence had been erected around the Taylor Square public toilet. I peeked over the top, and this is what I saw.

I’m pretty sure it’s Dale Miles’s Underworld (the latest in the Taylor Square Plinth project – we blogged about Louisa Dawson’s work in October). He’s shown widely since graduating from the National Art School several years ago – see more here.

He says it’s a response:

to the mysteriousness of the shape of the space enclosed by the entrance fence and the two descending staircases. It is the mystery of the void inverted, the spider exiting its funnel.

The original idea is this. More pictures to come.

[UPDATE - Feb 25]

The work is taking shape on Taylor Square.

This little bit of alpine art is on the loading dock of a Surry Hills warehouse, just behind the Bourke Street Bakery and around the corner from the Brett Whiteley Studio.

It’s a series of craggy mountain tops, set in pink – each mountain seems to have a letter, but I can’t make sense of it – it’s out the back of Gineico Marine’s Devonshire Street warehouse, on Esther Street and Esther Lane.

There are quite a few other bits of street art on the block – see local blog Acid Midget for more. Little stencil galleries like this are tucked away across Darlinghurst and Surry Hills, I wonder whether the work tends to cluster because of a lack of monitoring, support from residents and local businesses, or just that once one person’s done a stencil at a spot, others want to join them.

Walking through Taylor Square today at lunchtime, several council workers were hard at it laying some bitumen next to the old loos on the northern side of Oxford Street.

I asked one of the guys what it was they were working on. He told me it was for a “temporary art thing”.

Intriguing. Watch this space.

It’s been a busy week for the guerrilla knitters in Kings Cross.

Three days ago, we caught their yarn going up in Fitzroy Gardens, but they’ve been working around the clock with a crane and a giant ladder, and the results are spectacular.

I love the idea of public art, but all too often the stark modernist blocks and balls in our public squares seem more alienating than intriguing. They stand so defiantly, inscrutable.

I Heart Kings Cross is something quite different. Warm, friendly – probably a bit smelly after all the rain – each piece of crochet and cross-stitch is so obviously made by someone.

It’s glorious and wonderful.

A pair of eyes are ogling across at a bikini-clad pole (that’s at the pedestrian crossing where Darlinghurst Road becomes Macleay Street), and, as if to underscore the knitters’ take on public art, they’ve wrapped one of the discs in Dennis Wolanski’s Angled Wheels of Fortune in a relaxed, loose weave – “Chill out, ’80s sculptor.”

The police station has been drafted, too, and the entire spectacle now stretches a little further down Macleay Street and up Darlinghurst Road, though the focus remains on Fitzroy Gardens.

This is one of the most unexpectedly glorious things I’ve seen in ages. Walk by, if you can.

Brisbane via NYC artist Anthony Lister breezed through town a little while ago.

He left this face on a Little Oxford Street wall, near Ching-a-Lings.

Artists are trying all sorts of techniques to get by right now. The occupants of a top floor terrace on the corner of Forbes and Burton Streets, Darlinghurst, have paintings in the windows with a sign saying they are for sale.

Then these appeared.

Norman Pentzien, who’s based at 3 Darlinghurst Road, according to this, plastered poles around the neighbourhood this week.

If you need artwork on your wall, truck, clothes, or anywhere, small, big. Call me: 0406075108. Norman, I am experienced with any kind of architecture.

He’s on Facebook, and according to his Myspace page, on the road – Berlin, Goa, Sydney?

Walking through Taylor Square on Sunday afternoon, we noticed this.

Denise Litchfield, of Newtown, had descended on the old below-ground toilet the night before with a cast of “lavatory assistants, urban knitters and crocheters.”

It’s Sydney’s last surviving underground toilet (not including those in train stations) – it’s a convenience that’s not that convenient, because it’s not open – though it gets a last gasp every now and again via an art project like this.

Denise, who also blogs here, knitted this as part of Sydney Design 09.

Galleries getting more confident. Latest issue of Art World has an advert for Bill Henson on the back. This edit, spotted in Darlinghurst in November, suggests someone’s not sure.

(via Bim Bam Boom)

Woman’s Day circa ‘99/last year’s Harpers are fine for most surgeries, but East Sydney Doctors, across the road from the National Art School on Burton Street in Darlinghurst, takes a different approach.

The current show’s by Emerald Fitzgerald and Andy Hopkins. Adam Cullen and Cash Brown have shown here, too, among others.

They blog too.

I walk past a building on the corner of Craigend Street and Kirketon Road in Darlinghurst most days. It has an intricate facade, and a seemingly perfect location overlooking Kings Cross and the city.

Yet it’s played host to a string of bars and restaurants, including the lamented Global Burgers. You might see a shadow of old vomit too.

Haunted, cursed, bad feng shui?

In the buzz following Clover Moore’s liquor licensing changes, a DA went through to open ‘Lotus Wine Bar’ downstairs. Seems like such a cool location. It was going to be a seven day a week, 11am to 3am place. But less than two months later, in August, the $75,000 proposal was withdrawn.

Background 10/12/08

Prompted by Scot’s comment below, I checked out the background for Dale Jones-Evans’s intriguing (and, in 2004, award winning) building. It’s all here.

As the architect and developer I imagined a precious, gritty little building exploding out of this tiny, Tokyo-like, 7 x 15 metre, forgotten site. A commercial redevelopment appeared more suitable to the intense nodal semiology of the Kings Cross circus, William Street Boulevard, the corner condition; the urbanity of traffic-tunnel-signage and the general prevalence of human lunacy.

I think the Emily Kame Kngwarreye work’s gone though. Anyone know when/where?