Bronze sculpture of Professor Fay Gale made by artist Melisea Judge. Photograph courtesy Andre Castellucci.
Meliesa Judge
Sculpture of Professor Fay Gale, 2024 -2025
Bronze on engraved Mintano slate
Commissioned by University of Adelaide
Delivered by Guildhouse
The bronze sculpture of Professor Emerita Fay Gale AO, created by figurative sculptor Meliesa Judge of Liquid Metal Studios, stands as a tribute to female scholarship at the University of Adelaide. A pioneering cultural geographer, Professor Gale was an advocate for equal opportunity for women and Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples. Her groundbreaking research into Indigenous issues opened new avenues of thought and continues to shape academic discourse today.
Commissioned as part of the University’s Public Realm Plan for the North Terrace Campus, the sculpture contributes to a series of Cultural Walks designed to engage the broader community with South Australia’s history and the University’s development. The University of Adelaide engaged Guildhouse to oversee the commission, selecting Judge through a shortlisting process. With a history of memorialising strong female figures in her practice, Judge dedicated 18 months to crafting this lasting tribute to Professor Gale’s enduring legacy.
Artist Biography:
Meliesa Judge is a figurative sculptor and a bronze worker. She shares her life and her studio with sculptor Will Kuiper. The two artists create separately and assist each-other with the technical realisation of the sculptures.
Thirty years of sculpting and making has been a journey of many narratives.
Meliesa’s sculptures are anchored in the ethereal beauty of the human form, the nuance of faces, the subtlety of movement and posture, history and metaphor, while at the same time grappling with the physical demands of the materials; clay, plaster, rubber, wax, the firing of kilns, roar of the furnace, the weight and heat of the molten metal, the rattle of grinders, fragile moulds and ageless bronzes.
Strong female leaders from history animate her work. Her first nationwide commission was Mary Ward for the eight Loreto schools in Australia. One of the first feminist leaders in the Catholic church, Mary was excommunicated for her work, for her belief that if you educate women you will change the world.
Subsequent life sized sculptures include Catherine McAuley and St Elizabeth Seton. Social justice issues come to into focus with St Ignatius of Loyola and Thomas Carr. Her very first public site commission, The Waterbirds 1998, is in the University of Adelaide Collection in the Waite Arboretum. Meliesa is a Churchill Fellow 2001.
Meliesa takes a full immersion approach to a new project. She reads widely and deeply on her subject to find the essence of a visual idea. A sculpture is a metaphoric language, where just a few gestures and objects, an implied movement, a facial expression stand for a whole lived history.
The sculpture of Professor Fay Gale is both specific, and also intended to reflect the wider lens of female scholarship at the University of Adelaide over the last 150 years.
The sculpture stands tall, shoulders back, relaxed, intent. Weight on one foot, slight rotation, compression and stretch in the torso. She turns her head to gaze North, compass aligned in hand, maps at her feet. Her clothes and shoes reflect her era. Her hair is short and modern.
The Academic robe is almost a character in itself. Generic, symbol of academic endeavour across time and across gender. Women fought hard to have the right to wear this robe. Here it wraps around the figure and falls in soft and gracious folds.
Meliesa found a life model for this project, with a tall slender line. She sculpted the clay first as an unclad figure before sculpting the clothes and robe over it. This is the technique of the old masters, capturing the musculature and energy of a figure beneath its clothes. The face was created using a handful of photos of Fay as reference. The photos, kindly supplied by her daughter, span sixty years, from the vivacious young mother through to the elder stateswoman. Meliesa endeavoured to capture Fay’s warmth and intelligence, the slight asymmetry of her face, her direct and piercing gaze, the smile caught in the muscles around the eyes.
The work has taken eighteen months of intense focus. Six months for the clay original, Meliesa working with the life model Fern Mines, up at their home studio in the Sellicks ranges. The sculpture, moulds and casting waxes are all hand made in studio. The artists usually cast their own work however on this occasion the bronze was poured by Tim Thompson. The bronze sections were finished by Meliesa and Will in their Lynton studios. Will constructed the stainless steel internal armature and came up with genius solutions for the assembly of the 35 segments of bronze, welding them seamlessly together around the armature. Meliesa spent a few hundred hours matching and detailing the surface, with the sculpture suspended on a block and tackle from the ceiling.
Sculpture of Professor Fay Gale. Photograph courtesy of Kate Paneros of Urban Safari
Meliesa Judge and Will Kuiper sculpting Professor Fay Gale. Photograph courtesy of Will Kuiper
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