Sculpture by the Sea 2024: giant melanoma on Sydney beach to deliver ‘message that will be hard to ignore’

Sculpture has a knack of provoking debate. The medium’s ability to divide viewers on the aesthetics of a work – and often its cost to the public purse – can make sculpture a polarising subject. But it’s rare for a work to claim it may save lives.

Working in the field of advertising, Sydney creative Andrew Hankin is not above hyperbole. But his team’s entry into this year’s Sculpture by the Sea could very well save a life or lives, as visitors to Tamarama gaze down in horror/awe/morbid fascination at a gargantuan sculpture resembling a melanoma.

Creator of the enormous We’re Fryin’ Out Here’ frying pan for the 2014 Sculpture by the Sea, Hankin is reprising his skin cancer awareness-through-art project with an inflatable sculpture constructed from heavy-duty fabric. Titled Melanoma, the work will almost imperceptibly change in size, shape and colour as the outdoor exhibition progresses.

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It may be less lighthearted that his previous work, Hankin acknowledges, but a decade on he felt a more “cutting approach” was needed.

“It’s a really big issue, and I think in the sense of bigness, we wanted to go out there and create something that hadn’t been done before in terms of scale,” he says.

“It’s going to have a message that will be hard to ignore this summer.”

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Just how the three-metre-high by 20-metre-wide melanoma will change colour, as well as its shape and size, will remain an artist’s secret.

“We almost want people to not recognise that it’s changed at first,” he says.

“We want people to feel like, ‘Oh wow, that changed in front of my eyes, and I didn’t really realise it’ … because that almost feels like how you would recognise a melanoma on your own skin.”

The creative team of Hankin, Andy Cooke and Matthew Aberline will be joined by Scott Maggs, who founded Skin Check Champions following the death of his closest friend from skin cancer at the age of 26.

According to Cancer Council NSW, two out of three Australians will be diagnosed with some type of skin cancer during their lifetime, and Australia is one of the world leaders in skin cancer research and treatment.

Early detection of melanomas is critical, Maggs says.

“Over 60% of skin cancers are actually identified by the people who had them on their skin. It’s something really important for every Australian to learn, to look out for changes and things that are new.”

Skin Check Champions provides free early detection services, including to regional and remote communities, and educates people with the “A, B, C, D, E” mantra – A for asymmetry, B for border, C for colour, D for diameter and E for evolution.

On the weekend of 26 and 27 October the organisation will be conducting free skin checks for people coming to view the melanoma sculpture on the Tamarama sand. When the exhibition concludes on 4 November, Skin Check Champions will take up a 10-day residency at the Bondi Surf Bathers’ life saving club, where it hopes to screen about 2,000 people.

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The Sculpture by the Sea venture is the second artistic collaboration the not-for-profit is entering into, having partnered with Spencer Tunick for the 2022 Bondi beach work where 2,500 people stripped off not just in the name of art, but also to draw awareness to skin cancer.

The costs of both creating the sculpture and staging the mass skin check events are being jointly funded by sunscreen manufacturer La Roche-Posay and pharmaceutical company Bristol Myers Squibb.

Now in its 26th year, the world’s largest free-to-the-public outdoor sculpture exhibition opens on 18 October. The 2km coastal walk from Bondi Beach to Tamarama is expected to host almost half a million visitors during the 18-day event.

This year will feature the work of a dozen Japanese sculptors, including Haruyuki Uchida, Keizo Ushio and Toshio Iezumi, artists from across Europe and Asia and works by four Australian artists – James Rogers, John Petrie, Stephen King and Paul Bacon – who exhibited in the first Sculpture by the Sea in 1997.