A moment of perfect serendipity has brought a powerfully striking new figure to the Tallawoladah Lawn in front of the Museum of Contemporary Art Australia (MCA). Ancient Feelings, by British artist Thomas J Price, rises over three metres high: a golden bronze head of a Black woman, calm and Sphinx-like, gazing across the water. Positioned on the edge of Sydney Harbour/Warrane, the work launches the Neil Balnaves Tallawoladah Lawn Commission, a three-year series of public artworks presented by the MCA.

In 2023, Price travelled to Sydney for the first time during a brief stopover on his way home from Melbourne, where his works were included in the NGV Triennial. Visiting the MCA, he was immediately struck by the vista in front of the museum, recognising it as an ideal setting for a work-in-progress that had already taken up residence in his creative psyche. Not long afterwards, the Museum approached Price —unaware of the coincidence—with an invitation to create a new commission for that very site.

Price has spent the past two decades disrupting and rethinking the way we see public monuments. Trained at Chelsea College of Art and the Royal College of Art in London, he is best known for large-scale bronzes depicting fictional, everyday Black figures. These composite characters—drawn from art history, including Greek and Roman statuary and the Benin Bronzes in the British Museum, as well as mass media imagery and everyday people glimpsed in the street—carry the weight of history without replicating its hierarchies. Reflecting his own experience of rarely seeing people like himself represented in art or museums, Price places these figures in public spaces traditionally reserved for rulers and empire-builders.

Ancient Feelings is one of the artist’s largest public artworks to date, simultaneously timeless and undeniably contemporary.  Known for a practice that combines ancient tradition with cutting-edge technologies—from lost-wax casting to 3D printing—Price’s focus on constant experimentation has allowed him to realise this new work in golden bronze alloy, a material with strong maritime associations and imbued with poetic resonance given the sculpture’s harbour-side setting.

Situated as it is on unceded Gadigal land, Ancient Feelings inevitably enters a local conversation about Sydney’s colonial history and the continuing visibility of historic monuments celebrating figures and narratives tied to violence and dispossession. MCA curator Megan Robson notes: “Thomas was really interested in the notion of the individual stories and individual emotions of the people who make up history—particularly those stories that are left out of the official histories, which as we know are frequently written from one perspective. In a place like Sydney Harbour/Warrane, there are so many stories, both culturally and historically… This work engages with those stories and, in a broader sense, asks us to consider which histories and people are represented in our public monuments.”

As Price explains: “The work is really given its identity by the location. I place the work and I have to be open to the reception and interpretation of it. It’s about connecting Sydney to a global conversation that’s happening about empathy, about humanity… I try to talk about the thread that connects us all, which is this idea of who gets to be viewed as human and who gets to experience this humanity fully, especially in public places.”

With international projects unveiled to significant acclaim, 2025 has been a landmark year for Price. In Grounded in the Stars, he presented a 3.6-metre bronze figure of a casually confident Black woman powerfully inhabiting space in New York’s Times Square, while Time Unfolding introduced a monumental figure of a young Black woman absorbed in her mobile phone into Florence’s Piazza della Signoria. Both works are examples of Price’s gently subversive approach to reclaiming visibility for Black figures in contemporary culture.

Reflecting on this latest Sydney commission, Price reflects: “For this new work I chose this golden bronze alloy because I really wanted this fictional person to gleam and to be a beacon, someone I hope people feel connected to or at least very curious about. I always say that the viewer gets to decide who that person is, bringing their own understandings, attitudes, and associations. And so I hope that’s what people will get from this work… an opportunity to see an artwork which might feel monumental, but it’s not using the same language as monuments. Is critiquing, in fact, the language of monuments, and hopefully welcoming people into creating a connection, as opposed to suppressing it through the dominant trope of monument.”

In doing so, Ancient Feelings not only marks a milestone in Price’s practice but also invites Sydney audiences to reconsider our monuments and the stories—and people—they elevate.

Ancient Feelings
Thomas J Price
Tallawoladah Lawn, Museum of Contemporary Art Australia
On view until April 2026