By arts editor HELEN MUSA

A giant four-metre-long steel Murray cod arrived at Tuggeranong Arts Centre on Friday morning.

The hand-crafted steel armature, named Mangi the Murray Cod, was installed in an hour-long operation, launching Weaving Waters: Mangi the Murray Cod, a collaborative project that will culminate in a lakeside artwork to be unveiled during the 2026 Craft + Design Canberra Festival in November.

Tuggeranong Arts Centre visual arts manager Ann McMahon said the project represented an unusual collaboration between artists, engineers and the wider community.

The sculpture, she said, was designed by Canberra sculptor Steven Holland, who had gone to unusual lengths to ensure its accuracy.

“The design process has relied on photos, drawings and a maquette, for which Steven worked directly from a Murray cod purchased from the fish market,” McMahon said.

Using Holland’s designs, fabricators Graeme and Ned spent a day scaling the fish to 8.7 times its original size before transferring the outline to a specially constructed blackboard to create the steel framework.

The pair said building the cod was unlike their everyday fabrication work.

“We decided to approach the construction in the same way we would with a transmission tunnel in an auto assembly,” Graeme said. “And Ned re-did the mouth four times to get it just right.”

Over coming months, informed by First Nations perspectives, the steel frame will be transformed by hundreds of community participants who, using coiled weaving techniques, will create woven circles that will be stitched together to form the cod’s distinctive speckled skin.

For his part, Holland said, “Our big Murray cod sculpture is an intersection of fibre sculpture, material storytelling, environmental practice and community participation.”

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