Dreamy, innocent and grand, artist Nick Cave makes work you can’t resist. Immediate and enchanting, his public performance art pieces are designed to break you out of your every day and sweep you away in their exuberant rhythm.

In Sydney as a guest of Carriageworks, Cave is presenting HEARD~SYD with the support of BresicWhitney, the Visual Arts Partner. All his performances are presented free and will be shown today at 5pm Thursday 10 November, at Pitt Street Mall and twice on Saturday at 10am and 12 noon, at Carriageworks. Share your image or short video of NICK CAVE: HEARD~SYD on Instragram #heardsyd @bresicwhitney @carriageworks for your chance to win two 2017 Season Passes to Carriageworks.

The U.S. based artist and professor of fashion, says he loves to work with the idea of identity and uses costume as a way to negate the visual prejudice. Cave wants people to look at the work and enjoy it without judgement.

Best known around the world for his soundsuits, these stunning sculptural forms are based on the scale of his body. To the untrained eye they look like giant, circus horse costumes, made from swishing layers of colourful raffia. But these wildly decorative soundsuits are deliberately designed to camouflage the body, masking and creating a second skin that conceals race, gender, and class.

Internationally acclaimed, Nick Cave is unique among performance artists working today. His projects are ambitious and highly original, but they tackle highly political ideas with a sense of wonder and play. In person Nick Cave is a softly spoken, gentle man who smiles a lot and has strong and small team around him of choreographers and assistants.

When he talks about the work he likens it to children throwing a sheet over their back to take the form a horse, or to his mother putting a sock on hand and making it in to a puppet when he was a child. His work he says, should evoke this type innocence, but present it on a much grander scale.

Cave who has never presented such a large work in Australia, is highly respected by his peers as an educator and messenger with a strong point of view. He is also regarded as someone who skips easily between mediums making work that manages to lift audiences and create moments of reflection.

“I think we tend not to take the time out to create that dream space in our heads,” said Cave at the time of making HEARD back in 2013. “At the time I was really thinking of getting us back to this dream state, this place where we imagine and think about now and how we exist and function in the world,” said Cave.

Cave says that when he was starting to create work, he was also thinking about how best to disrupt people going about their every day commute in Grand Central Station. “We all need that, to we leave our jobs every day and I think that is what is special about the work. I am interested in how something very subtle can change our way of operating,” Cave says.

Different from many acclaimed artists who come to Australia to show work that has been developed in their studios, Cave likes to come to a city and customise his work for local audiences. This time HEARD has been localised by using 60 Sydney dancers and a local group of musicians who have developed the accompanying score for the performance. It is a brave mission but one the artist says keeps the work feeling fresh.

“I am an artist with a civic responsibility,” says Cave. “I come at the work with a consciousness. And yes we could bring the entire troupe here, the musicians and everything – do the entire performance and pack up and leave. But how do we leave an imprint of a moment in time? How do we engage the community?”

“We prefer to bring a project to a place, and then hire the community to build it,” Cave says.

Share your image or short video of NICK CAVE: HEARD~SYD on Instragram #heardsyd @bresicwhitney @carriageworks for your chance to win two 2017 Season Passes to Carriageworks.

Thursday 10 November: 5pm Pitt St Mall, Sydney 

Saturday 12 November: 10am and 12pm, Carriageworks