The Pallion Garden Terrace Opens at the Art Gallery of New South Wales
Interview by A-M Journal
Good museums posture narrative, great museums posture conversation. Whether amongst the visitors or the embedded themes of the artworks, the gallery space should involve some rambling with history, an ongoing inflection with shifting cultures and zeitgeists. The gravitas of the old Art Gallery of New South Wales (AGNSW), now armed by its sleek contemporary counterpart Naala Badu, materialises this. Bridging the two, however, is a new threshold for artistic presentation. The Pallion Garden Terrace, designed by Kathryn Gustafson and Wyer & Co., is an open-air viewing space that does away with the lauded ‘white cube’ gallery model and rectifies art with nature. Consciously designed as an extension of the AGNSW’s surrounding environment, the terrace teems with native flora and bespoke brass features, extending the gallery’s reach to the outdoors.
The terrace was inaugurated by Guido Maestri’s Old Man Banks, a bronze bust commissioned and supported by the Pallion Foundation. Sitting atop a roughly hewn stone pedestal, the sculpture depicts botanist Sir Joseph Banks. It gleams a powder-blue despite its raw, moth-eaten texture. Maestri makes poignant commentary on the mutability of legacy and Australia’s colonial past, depicting Banks’ face as haggard and partially collapsed. Christmas beetles, native insects attracting concern due to their dwindling numbers, freckle the bust and swarm its base in life-like metallic renderings. Together, Pallion, the AGNSW and Maestri offer their shared simpatico: a desire to create and platform works that provoke and start meaningful discourse. But more importantly, a willingness to situate themselves within the public as invitations to remember, reconsider and reimage how art is presented and the dialectics it proposes.
Below, A-M speaks to Maud Page, director of AGNSW, Andrew Cochineas from Pallion, and Guido Maestri to further explore.
Arts-Matter: The Pallion Garden Terrace sits physically and symbolically between the Art Gallery’s original sandstone building and the new Naala Badu building. What kind of conversations do you hope this space — and works like Old Man Banks — will spark for visitors?
MAUD PAGE: The Pallion Garden Terrace is a distinctive open-air space, woven into the original Naala Nura building and surrounding landscape, with sightlines to our new building, Naala Badu. This unique setting allows us to commission and display artworks that are in dialogue with both buildings and the natural world that connects them. Works like Old Man Banks deepen our connection to place and ignite conversations about the environment, history, and our collective care for Country.”
A-M: Outdoor collection spaces are still relatively rare in Australian galleries. How does this terrace expand the ways the Art Gallery of NSW can share art with the public?
MP: Open-air sculpture gardens integrate art with nature and offer visitors a chance to encounter art in new and less formal ways. We hope the Pallion Garden Terrace will become a space for the quiet enjoyment of art, where everyone feels welcome and can experience works in ways that feel both expansive and personal.
A-M: Old Man Banks is both a work of art and a statement about history, memory, and the environment. Why was it important for Pallion to support a piece that engages with such complex narratives?
ANDREW COCHINEAS: At Pallion, we believe art should not be confined by boundaries — historical, material, or conceptual. That is why the Pallion Arts Program is deliberately limitless and always artist led. We want artists to feel free to explore everything — including the most complex and challenging aspects of our shared history. Old man Banks by Guido Maestri is not only a striking artwork but also a meditation on history, memory, and the environment. Supporting a commission that directly engages with colonial legacies, First Nations knowledge, and the natural world was important to us because it demonstrates what we value most: art that provokes thought, invites dialogue, and enriches the public realm.
A-M: Pallion’s Arts Program has quickly grown from commissioning landmark works to creating civic-scale projects like the Garden Terrace. How do you see this program shaping the cultural landscape in the long term?
AC: At Pallion, we have always aspired to help build the cities of the future — the places where we want to live, work, and belong. We often asked ourselves: What could the Pallion Foundation give back to our home — to Sydney, to Australia, and to the world — that would truly endure? The Pallion Arts Program has always been our answer. Art is enduring. Art inspires. Our hope is that the Pallion Arts Program outlives us and continues to enrich generations to come. Our vision is to create a living legacy — a collection that is sustainable, artist-led, and woven into the public realm. The Pallion Garden Terrace embodies this ambition. Designed by Kathryn Gustafson and realised with Wyer & Co., it connects the Gallery’s old and new buildings, becoming a meeting point between history and the future — a place to celebrate art, artists, and the act of creation itself. In the long term, we see the Pallion Arts Program shaping the cultural landscape by ensuring art is not confined to institutions, but embedded in the civic fabric. These are works and spaces that endure — inspiring, challenging, and uplifting communities for generations.
A-M: Old Man Banks interrogates colonial history while weaving in ecological loss through the imagery of the Christmas beetle. What do you hope audiences reflect on when they encounter this work in the open air?
GUIDO MAESTRI: Much of my work is concerned with memory, lineage and history, and I hope this piece sparks conversations about which parts of the past might be reconsidered. As a kid, Christmas beetles were so prevalent. They would arrive in great numbers every summer, clinging to the fly screen door and marking the start of the new season. Over time, their numbers have dwindled, and now they have all but vanished from greater Sydney. I literally had to go to the Australian Museum for a specimen to work from, as I could not find one beetle last summer. I like the idea that as the silver is exposed to the elements it will slowly patina. It’s a way of embedding time and change directly into the work.
A-M: Working with Pallion’s artisans meant bringing silver and bronze into your practice in new ways. How did this collaboration influence both the making and meaning of the sculpture?
GM: It was an incredible experience to collaborate with the artisans at Palloys and W.J. Sanders and I was able to explore materials and methods that I hadn’t worked with before. Their skills opened up possibilities that I wouldn’t have been able to achieve on my own, especially working with precious metals like silver. Having access to that level of craftsmanship and precision allowed me to push the work in a new direction. When I’m working in bronze I am using this everlasting heroic material, but I’m trying to communicate the idea of change. The idea that some monuments may last too long. So I have presented the sculpture as malleable and impermanent. The material itself is permanent but the ideas surrounding it can shift and change over time.
A-M: Joseph Banks is a deeply controversial figure — celebrated in some histories, but also a symbol of dispossession. How did you navigate that tension in portraying him?
GM: Old Man Banks presents a familiar historical figure, not as a heroic young explorer but as a gnarly old man whose colonial legacy is a complicated one. Depicting him as an older man felt important — I wanted to communicate the idea of change and how the legacies of figures like Banks can shift over time.