Name of Artwork
Pullinger Kop Group/Southern Cross Gateway
Location and Accessibility
The artworks are located on and around the bridge that crosses Nugget street which operates as a major point of entry into Hillbrow and Berea from the south.
Level of Significance
Major Gateway Artworks
About the Artworks
The artworks were all commissioned between 2007 and 2009 in the context of the Hillbrow-Berea-Yeoville Public Artworks programme, financed by the JDA, with the Trinity Session/Ngwedi Design partnership acting as commissioning agent and overall project manager. The group of three major artworks dramatically mark this entry-point into Hillbrow.
Maja Marx’s Steps Artwork along the walkway that leads up Pullinger Kop, narrates the route up Pullinger Kop through texts extracted from the late Phaswane Mphe’s novel, Welcome to My Hillbrow, and laser-cut into steel strips that run along each step. The novel captures the complexities, challenges and contradictions of life in one of the most challenged urban environments in the world.
The second major intervention consists of intricate mosaics, designed and produced by Andrew Lindsay and artists associated with the Spaza Art Gallery, can be found on the rock embankment on Nugget street and on Pullinger Kop create the impression of running water. They are accompanied by mosaics of various insects and animals applied to steel shapes attached to the rock of the embankment and around the waterfall.
The project – The Southern Cross(ing) – was also designed and fabricated by Lindsay and Spaza artists. It consists of three ‘layers’ of creative engagement with the structure of the Bridge:
• A canopy over the bridge with an abstract design that references the Southern Cross constellation
• Mosaic inlays on applied to the tiling on the bridge walkway, designed to create the impression of a magnetic field
• Steel and mosaic work underneath the bridge reference the mine reefs that run underneath the city and which were the basis for it’s wealth
About the Location
The artworks are located on Pullinger Kop, a green space in close proximity to the historic Windybrow Theatre to the immediate southwest. The building was originally built by a mining engineer as a family home in 1896 – a very old building in Johannesburg terms. It was converted into a theatre in the 1980s, declared a monument in 1996, and designated as a national cultural institution in 2005.
