Mali in the City: celebrating 150 years of Melbourne Zoo

Mali is the first elephant born at Melbourne Zoo. To celerate 150 years of Melbourne Zoo, lifesize, fibreglass sculptures of the baby elephant Mali were painted by 50 different artists. The sculptures were then dotted around Melbourne's CBD for 6 weeks, and then displayed for another month at the zoo itself. More about it here.

I didn't see all of them up close but these guys did.

Here are my shots:

A Pattern of Orange-bellied Parrot
Vanessa Bong (sponsored by Queen Victoria Market)
at Queen Victoria Market in Melbourne



Ming Vase Elephant
by Brian Cheung (sponsored by ecoFuture)
at Queen Victoria Market

I was chatting with a lady who said she travelled about to see the sculptures and that this was the best one she had seen. I was very impressed by it myself. I didn't endeavour to see more because I suspected that I had seen what I would conclude was the best one too. It's hard to convey the tonal quality of this piece in a photo.




Detail of side facing wall:

Even more Spring blooms.

This time the blooms have been chosen not so much for their beauty - which is still there - but for their unusual structural qualities.

A rose reminiscent of a love heart:


Some rose buds:


Cephalopodlian Aquilegia buds (I think they look like squid, my housemate F thinks the greenish ones look like seamonster heads):



The same bud but a pretty shot:

Oh, holy corn cob.

Don't you hate it when you drop one of your husked corn cobs from Victoria Market
down the back of the bagging bench at Aldi,
and it plops into their Christmas window display,
lying among little bell shaped chocolates and cotton wool
like Jesus in the manger with straw, and the animals, kings and things,
and you can't reach it,
and you won't leave your stuff unattended
but you really want your corn cob back,
so you hope to catch the eye of the cleaner with his broom
then an attentive check out chick comes and asks what's wrong
and she gets the cleaner to help you out
using the handle of his broom to push the corn cob within reach?

Yeah me too...

Interesting car plates

I don't play with Lego as an adult but I can understand this one. Old school Lego is cool! I quite like SpongeBob SquarePants and it really suits this slightly boxy, yellow hatchback. I can not explain this one. Colour me bemused.

Street art: House, Fitzroy North

Fitzroy North near Alexander Parade ,October 2012 This house is covered in art, including the front fence!

Street art: crushed can, Melbourne CBD

Another cast concrete sculpture in the Melbourne CBD (near corner of Bourke and Elizabeth), possibly from the same artist as this burger and fries. I ran a few random words through Google Translator in both Chinese and Japanese to see if any characters resembling it came up.  The character is Chinese meaning 'dead'. If anyone of you can clarify/confirm I'd like to hear from you in the comments.