You might have seen Dale Miles’ sculptures on one of the most iconic, beautiful walks in Australia – the Bondi to Coogee Coastal Walk.
For over two decades Dale has been shaping form and perception at Sculpture By The Sea, and this year, he built a studio on a headland so that people could see him at work.
Dale studied ancient and renaissance art in Italy and France, graduating with a Bachelor of Fine Arts from the National Art School, Sydney in 2006. He was the recipient of the Sculpture by the Sea Major prize at Cottesloe in 2016, the Helen Lempriere Scholarship in 2015, a major public sculpture commission from the City of Sydney for Taylor Square in 2010. Dale also teaches and has lectured on painting, drawing and sculpture at the Art Gallery of New South Wales, and the National Art School.
With another chapter of Sculptures by the Sea having closed, Dale reflects on the shifts of his creative processes, and his evolving relationship with the inspiring coastal location that has served as a stunning stage for his work. In 2025, quite literally.
Where does a sculpture begin for you?
Quite often, the idea comes out of the making, and I can’t stress that enough. At least half, if not more, of the works made for Sculptures by the Sea begin that way – through intuition. It’s like jazz. You start jamming and you follow your nose. That’s what makes it fun, not only for me, but for the people who experience the work. Purely visual things catch my eye and make me think: ‘Oh, I can do a figure that’s walking, but their head is sort of behind the sky.’ Then the next phase of thought is something like – how could that be turned into a sculpture?
How do you approach sculpture differently from other visual arts?
I focus on the visual and the tactile. That’s a very important part that makes sculpture different from all the other visual arts. Not only is there a visual interest in what this looks like, but part of the making of this is translating how it looks by how it feels. For instance, if there’s an aspect of an object that seems heavy, I want to really get a sense of volume and gravity and pull on that. Likewise, with a sense of lightness you can thin things out further. You can slightly exaggerate those volumes to mimic what it was like to be in a body.
How has your process evolved since your first Sculpture by the Sea in 2003?
All of my works in the last decade have been what I loosely call ‘optical sculpture’, or ‘relief sculpture’. If you look at real Egyptian works for example, they’ve been carved directly into the wall. That’s loosely what my work does – dealing with the language of relief sculpture from deep history. That’s something I’ve always had ticking along in my work, but I’ve not shown it until the last ten to 12 years.
To demonstrate his point, Dale uses a sculpture that he was working on at Sculpture by the Sea – while in the studio he built himself in the park on the ocean cliffs. The studio was glass-fronted so that the half a million people streaming by could look in on him working. In effect, he and his goldfish-bowl studio were a sculpture, creating sculptures within a space caught in time.
The two pieces he worked on were distinct but also similar in some ways. One, a behemoth of a portly woman reflected above her chest, encourages viewers to look beyond the illusion and reflect upon the same figure from a different lens. The second is a svelte wooden sculpture, carved and whittled to resemble legs diving into water, with the form reflected at the waist.
Dale points to the wooden sculpture (above) that is a part of a person diving into water. The figure reflected in the water is yet to come. He explains:
This is only one part of the sculpture, with the other half yet to be done. There’s some more construction involved, and I’ll add the bottom piece to this part, and then bolts will hold it all together. It’s mostly figurative as well, which it wasn’t earlier on. So that’s how it’s changed, but I’ve always had this sense of visual perception being important to my work.
What are the main influences in your work?
I love the ancient world in the West – which includes a lot of Egyptian history.
Dale holds up a beautifully delicate head.
This is a vizier from Ptolemaic Egypt. This is an important period where Egypt went from the dynasties of Egyptian pharaohs to rule by the Greeks, where you have more naturalism occurring. In other words, the works of art started looking like the real individual.
There’s this old canon around the way Egyptians put things together so beautifully, but it wasn’t an exact replication of real human shapes. Then there’s also subtle indications of an individual starting to show up in the works, which the Romans and the Greeks did, of real people. Typically before then, they didn’t look like the person. It was just an ideal of human shapes and sizes, and those certain proportions were used for a given period. This makes it a continuous conversation – a relationship with the art that has come before you. It’s also a reminder that even thousands of years ago, artists were exploring the same questions we are today.
What did people most want to know when they saw you working at 2025 Sculpture by the Sea?
People love to see the process behind the work. My experience is that people ask a lot of questions on the tours and their visits here, and most of them end up asking how a work is made because they’re fascinated by the process. They really want to know because it’s so baffling to them, and also so beautiful. They want to know what the first step was in the life of a sculpture, and so I say – ‘Well, I’ll show you.’ I think that transparency helps people to connect with my work.
After eleven times exhibiting at Sculpture by the Sea, where do you find inspiration?
There’s a lot of looking. Sometimes, I’m sitting there like a stunned mullet, but I’m actually trying to make the visuals take hold and tell me something about where to go with it. There’s an obvious, real thing that plays an interesting part in this process: if you look at something for a long time, after a while, because it’s perhaps darker or lighter than the background, it’ll burn an image into your perception, your eye, your retina….that’s called an afterimage. If you move your eye around after that, it’ll start to bleed out, and you’ll get this edge that starts to have a different tonal quality in the background. That’s something I play with in the painted version, or it sometimes starts a new life as a new sculpture. That visual perception is very interesting.
What keeps people returning to Sculpture by the Sea year after year?
People love Sculpture by the Sea because they have a sense of knowing it, and belonging there while walking around. It’s not owned by a gallerist, and it’s not a space that they feel intimidated about moving around in. It’s a familiar Australian beach setting that they really love and they feel that they fostered this thing. It’s turned into this great show that’s probably one of the most well-known sculpture exhibitions in the world. I think the public are very proud of that. They don’t want it to become a lost entity and have to go back to feeling a bit intimidated going into a white cube space. People also know that Sculpture by the Sea is free. No tickets. That’s lovely.
What do you hope people take away from your work?
A sense of curiosity. I want people to slow down, to look closely, to notice how the light shifts or how texture draws their eye. Sculpture is about space and perception. Sculpture asks you to be present. It asks you to think about the world and space that is quite different to all the other artforms. If someone walks away seeing the world a little differently – even for a moment – that’s wonderful.
If you enjoyed this story, check out our story on upcoming art exhibitions across the country.