Michael Riddle

Michael Riddle has said, ‘In my work and methods; stability, uncertainty, and opposing forces engage with a narrative drawn from my personal biography’. The twelve-metre-high sculpture Iconoclast, developed from Riddle’s previous series Everything’s broken in which each sculpture was intended as the physical embodiment of an emotional shock.

Referencing the fragility of the human experience, Iconoclast was made following the death of the artist’s parents. Problematising perceptions of physical permanence, Riddle takes a symbol of modernity – an electrical pylon – and crumples it under the weight of an enormous rock.

Iconoclast was positioned at the Skye Road exit ramp on outer-Melbourne’s Peninsula Link Freeway between 2017 and 2021.