Where's your cossie, Oscar? How modesty won the day
By Adam Fulton | smh.com.au | 28 October
Creator ... Paul Trefry and the original boy. Photo: Brendan Esposito
The lifelike "lost boy" being exhibited at Sculpture by the Sea has a relative, it turns out, who isn't wearing swimmers or anything else.
And the model's father thinks that's just fine. Paul Trefry, 42, says he wanted his Little Boy Lost sculpture at the Bondi-to-Tamarama exhibition, which opens tomorrow, to be naked but was told to put pants on him and he did so "under duress".
But the film industry model-maker still has the original sculpture that gave him the idea for entering the show – a similar but smaller one he made of a friend's son about eight years ago.
It remains in his Leichhardt workshop without hair or swimmers. That friend, Marcus Thyer, said yesterday from Hamilton Island that he was happy for his son to be depicted naked in the original.
"To me it's ridiculous. Do we now go around every single cupid and ... cover the willy?
"You might feel slightly different about it if they'd plonked [the sculpture] in the middle of Pitt Street. But down on the beach it all makes sense. It's an absolute natural setting. I can't see anything wrong with it."
But Sculpture by the Sea's founder, David Handley, said the decision to clothe the boy was made with the exhibition's audience in mind.
Many people wouldn't be offended by the nude boy, but some might, and he believed it was better to err on the side of caution.
"What really jumped out at us was drawing a comparison with the [Bill] Henson situation," Handley said.
"The key thing for us was [in] our show we don't have the opportunity to tell members of the public what's in it. And if someone's coming along with their family, who are we to know what's going to cause affront or concern?
"Some ladies today who were at the exhibition, I asked them. They said, 'Oh yeah – you can't have a one-and-a-half-year-old nude like that'."
A spokeswoman for Waverley Council wanted to make clear that the plastic wrapping around Little Boy Lost in a photo in yesterday's Herald was used only to protect the work as it was being installed and was not part of the sculpture.
Trefry said he tried to stand his ground on keeping the sculpture nude to suggest the vulnerability of a young child lost from his parents at the beach.
"I live at North Bondi," he said. "There's naked kids running round all the time. I can kind of understand their issue with pedophilia but if a pedophile wants to get off there's the internet, do you know what I mean?
You're not going to stand in front of an oversized silicon statue of a child."
First published by Smh.com.au on October 28 2009
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