Hybrid 'horse men' to gallop at Tuggeranong Arts Centre

There is already a scary strangeness about Australia's wild, remote, outback places (timid bushwalkers imagine bunyips lurking behind every boulder). Now Canberra sculptor Stephen Harrison asks us to imagine something more, perhaps there among the trees, behind the boulders, half-submerged in the billabongs.

He hopes we'll find something "unnerving, unsettling" about the half horse/half human creatures of the sculptures and photographs of his exhibition, Equus Homo.

These horse/human blends have been a recurring theme of his. To last year's Sculpture by the Sea extravaganza (acclaimed and invited sculptors install their works along clifftops near Sydney's Bondi Beach), he contributed a huge figure half horse/half Shakespeare's troubled character, Hamlet. So large it had to be lowered by a giant crane down to a ledge on a cliff face, it depicted the horsey Hamlet holding a skull, just as Hamlet does in the play while he reminisces about the late Yorick.

As you read this Harrison is at work on a large, bronze "horse man" he's been enabled to work on after receiving a substantial award from AMP's annual Tomorrow Fund.

He explains hes been preoccupied by with what he calls his "horse men" ever since a visit long ago to Kosciuszko National Park during which he saw wild brumbies.

Yes, he's very well aware of the environmental damage they do but he does think them very "beautiful, magnificent animals". And he half-forgives them for being a despised-by-some "introduced species". After all, he muses, Europeans too have been introduced to this continent. And his personal sense of being "introduced" to Australia is magnified by having arrived here as a migrant, a small boy, from another country.

Then, too, he's thinking in his horsey works of how our high country's wild horses have become part of Australia's "mythology". And so he's trying to suggest in his works what he calls an "Australian Gothic ... Oz Gothic" quality in the wild outback. He says that in ancient Europe we looked to grim and scary castles and mansions for the unnerving and the unsettling but that in Australia, Europeans found a chilling equivalent in the alarming Australian bush, so deathly quiet, so very, very strange. In what he calls his "hybrid" horse men, we have a wholly Australian mythological creature adding to that uniquely unnerving, unsettling outback ambience.

Not that he wants us only to shudder at his horse men. He says that "I like a bit of humour", and that for example when we see one of his horse men carrying a human skull it is half-meant to amuse. In one striking photograph in his exhibition a stark white horse man, posed beside a stark white dead tree, is holding a stark white human skull in one hand as casually and as amusingly as if a human skull is an everyday accessory, like a handbag or a mobile phone.

Harrison's one-man-show, Equus Homo, is his prize as the winner of the Tuggeranong Arts Centre's Exhibition Award for his piece in last year's annual Sculpture in the Paddock show and award.

This year's Sculpture in the Paddock, in a field at Cooma Cottage near Yass, closes this Sunday. Harrison's surreal contribution to that show is called Let Us Sit upon Old Sculptures and Tell Sad Stories of the Death of Kings. It's a human/horse-headed being lying asleep with its head resting on Harrison's famous, and famously realistic, replica of a sinister World War II floating sea mine.