'Road Trip: Larry The Lobster'
'Road Trip: The Big Rocking Horse'
2026, hand woven tapestry (wool, cotton, linen)
Dimensions: 79.5cm w x 60cm h
There is something quietly wrong about a rocking horse that doesn't move.
The Big Rocking Horse has stood at Gumeracha since 1981 - 18.3 metres of steel set into 80 tonnes of concrete, specifically engineered to prevent rocking.
A childhood symbol of motion and comfort, fixed into permanent stillness. It is in the Guinness Book of Records. It endures, as roadside monuments do, through stubbornness and collective agreement that it should.
This work is part of an ongoing series engaging with Australia's Big Things - those strange, optimistic structures built to arrest passing motorists. Driver does not argue with that impulse. She just looks at it longer than is comfortable.
Rendered in handwoven tapestry, the horse emerges from deep black - lifted entirely from its Adelaide Hills context, the gentle rural landscape it has occupied for over forty years. Removed from that setting, something shifts. The scaffold beneath reads less like infrastructure and more like apparatus. The red cuts across the composition with an ambiguity the original never invited: road, wound, restraint. A children's icon that has always been too large, too still, too fixed to the earth to ever have been entirely innocent.
The Big Things were genuinely thrilling once. Before irony. Before we understood that a fibreglass fruit or a steel horse was someone's business plan dressed up as wonder. The horse was always frozen - we just hadn't learned yet to notice the difference.