New Lynn's legacy of pottery lives on

Louise Purvis checks the alignment of the panels she designed for the rail trench. Photo / Paul Estcourt

Almost 90,000 cubic metres of ground has made way for a mammoth railway trench through New Lynn, but the area's clay pottery legacy will endure through an array of subterranean artwork.

The first of 258 fibreglass-reinforced concrete panels have been laid along a trench wall next to where a new underground railway station is taking shape, and sculptor Louise Purvis was on hand yesterday to inspect their alignment.

"I'm really pleased with what they have done with them - it is a very liquid and tidy job," said Purvis, leader of a team of artists contracted by Waitakere City Council to ensure high-quality urban form for the New Lynn transport interchange opening in the middle of next year.

City arts project co-ordinator Mark Osborne said the panels, cast from moulds sculptured by Purvis to high durability standards and depicting topographic lines to reflect New Lynn's origins, would ultimately stretch more than 200m along each of the trench's two walls.

Although the walls will be, theoretically, inaccessible to passengers, on the other side of each set of duplicate railway tracks from the new station's "island platform", they will be coated with graffiti guard to protect them from tagging.

Mr Osborne said taggers generally concentrated on filling bare spaces, and tended to respect artwork by keeping their spray cans away.

The panels would be illuminated by floodlights from the platform, and their uneven surfaces would help with "acoustic dampening" in the cavernous railway trench, as well as concealing powerlines and fire-control services.

Weighing just 400kg, they were were also easier for construction crews to manipulate than solid concrete panels.

Although the panels were replicated by a local firm from four basic moulds, Purvis was careful to provide enough variety from different rotations of them for it to be impossible for one set of eyes to notice any repetition in their pattern.

Mr Osborne acknowledged that trying to find a pattern might help passengers to while away time waiting for trains, although the completion of the western railway line duplication project by the time the new station opens should minimise delays.

He and Purvis have spent more than two years preparing artwork for the $160 million trench and associated transport interchange, below and above ground.

That has meant working with architects and project engineers as equal members of a project design review team.