Mythical Mashup - The Graphic Worlds of Brian Robinson
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In collaboration with Torres Strait artist Brian Robinson - of the Maluyligal people of Western Torres Strait and the Wuthathi people of Shelburne Bay, East Coast of Cape York Peninsula - the Australian National Maritime Museum will present a trilogy of light-based installations across rooftop, harbour, and heritage architecture, transforming the precinct into a surreal realm where mythology, marine life, and pop culture collide.
Cosmic Chase
Rooftop Projection
Cosmic Chase transforms the museum rooftop into a looping, animated battleground where ancient mythology collides with pop culture and arcade-era fantasy. Drawing on the graphic language of Torres Strait artist Brian Robinson, the projection unfolds as a playful pursuit across a glowing field of geometric flowers, marine motifs, and bold patterning.
Figures drawn from sci-fi and gaming lore dart through the scene in a Pac-Man–style chase, weaving between symbols that reference Torres Strait cosmology and Robinson’s distinctive linocut aesthetic. The work collapses time and genre, placing ancestral knowledge, digital culture, and retro futurism into a single kinetic field.
Cosmic Chase invites viewers to look up and enter a world where myth is not fixed or historical, but active, hybrid, and continually reimagined. Light, motion, and repetition transform the rooftop into an arena of joyful collision - where stories loop, overlap, and unfold in perpetual motion.
This work features the art of Brian Robinson and was developed in collaboration with S1T2.
Floating Realm
Harbour & Lighthouse Installation
Floating Realm unfolds across the harbour and lighthouse as a sculptural landscape of LED-lit forms, hovering on the water’s surface and suspended in the sky. Monumental tentacles curl and rise from the harbour, joined by drifting fish, a glowing moon, and other forms drawn from Robinson’s visual world where marine life, mythology, and pop culture collide.
Extending from waterline to skyline, the work forms a loose, surreal tableau that reveals itself gradually from different vantage points around the harbour. Figures hover in darkness, their illuminated outlines punctuating the night and playing against reflection, scale, and distance. Robinson’s visual world plays out at scale, turning the museum into a stage for shifting scenes across water, sky, and shore.
Blending humour, symbolism, and cultural reference, Floating Realm invites audiences to experience the waterfront as an active site of story and imagination. Ancient motifs and contemporary icons coexist in a shared seascape, transforming the harbour into a luminous stage where narrative drifts, overlaps, and remains in motion.
This work features the art of Brian Robinson and was developed in collaboration with Junior Major.
Part of Vivid Sydney
Vivid Light displays are shown daily from 6pm until 11pm.
We encourage viewing from nearby vantage points – Pyrmont Bridge or King Street Wharf.
Brian Robinson
Brian Robinson, of the Maluyligal people of Western Torres Strait and the Wuthathi people of Shelburne Bay, East Coast of Cape York Peninsula, was born in 1973 on Waiben (Thursday Island) into a Roman Catholic family of fisher folk whose faith finds synergy with both Christian and traditional Torres Strait spirituality.
For over 25 years, he has developed an artistic practice that – much like his spirituality – draws deeply on ancient and contemporary ideas, themes and icons.
Graphic prints and contemporary sculptures are episodes in an intriguing narrative that links space invaders with the cosmology, classic literature with aural storytelling, and humour and fantasy with insights and history.
Robinson, who is based in Cairns, has been commissioned for several public artworks including the iconic stainless steel Woven fish (2003) sculptures installed in the Cairns Esplanade Lagoon and Reef Guardian (2017), a monumental sculptural work that focuses on the Great Barrier Reef.
In 2018, he was commissioned to design the athletes parade track for the Gold Coast Commonwealth Games. On the Whitsundays, he produced one of the Great Barrier Reef’s first underwater sculptures. His work has featured in multiple exhibitions nationally and internationally, including galleries in Germany, New Caledonia, Washington DC, New York, The Netherlands.
His work is represented in the collections of National Gallery of Australia, the Queensland Art Gallery/Gallery of Modern Art, the National Gallery of Victoria, the Australian National Maritime Museum, the Tjibaou Cultural Centre in New Caledonia and the Kluge-Ruhe Aboriginal Art Collection in Virginia, USA.
S1T2
S1T2 stands for Story 1st, Technology 2nd. We believe that stories are how we all understand the world. We’re dedicated to using interactive technologies to create world-class immersive experiences that realise the future of storytelling: a future where you can explore any world through your own story.
Experimenting at the intersection of art, story and technology, S1T2 is driven by a culture of adventurous exploration. Our multidisciplinary team works across an ever-expanding array of industries and technologies to create world-class work experiences that are meaningful and memorable for all who encounter them.
Junior Major
Junior Major is a collective of artists and technologists who make and merge digital and physical worlds.
Founded in 2022 by Shunji Davies, Claire Evans, and Tom Siddall, Junior Major’s practice sits at the intersection of art and technology, creating experiences, artworks, and installations as canvases for interpretation, imagination and play.
