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Ken Unsworth, a laconic Australian who grew up among farmers near Bendigo in country Victoria, adored his Paris-born pianist wife Elisabeth Volodarsky. He says he 'was born' the instant he met her in 1955. In October last year, after eight years of home care, she died in their house on Sydney Harbour. In May this year, the grieving sculptor invited friends and colleagues to honour his late wife in an event titled 'A Ringing Glass (Rilke)':

In accepting you are entering into a sacred contract with Elisabeth and Ken. Conditions: Full evening dress. You undertake to learn the dances ... Guests convoyed to Cockatoo Island by chartered ferry. Four installations ... dinner in the Grand Ballroom. Dancing. A posthumous recital by Elisabeth Unsworth ...

I remember the 1978 Venice Biennale when Suspended stone circle, 1974-77, launched Unsworth into the international art world. Those dangling river stones aspire to float in water or air, despite gravity. He also showed video documentation of his crucifixional Five secular settings for sculpture as ritual and burial piece.

The Secular settings of 1975 were static works using his own near-naked suspended body; the 'burial' was by sand, standing in an upright coffin of glass - shattered by a blow just in time to continue living. These tableaux vivants were shamanic rituals to maintain eternally cyclical life. They affirmed that shattered states - disordered, degraded and inert - are beginnings not ends: entropy can be reversed; energy returns. Just like the seasons in Greek mythology, whose nature-goddess Eurydice had to visit the underworld each winter.

On 28 May 2009, almost winter, we set out from Circular Quay. On the 'Island of Love and Death' we detoured through a sandstone tunnel, accompanied by Gluck's lament Orfeo ed Euridice, before arriving at the vast Turbine Hall that once generated power for a shipyard. Anterooms offered sparkling wine and chamber music. Then came a ritual traverse through the sound-and-movement installations, in their white cube spaces, and at last a ballroom, glittering with chandeliers and cut-glass candelabra.

Heading our printed program was an epigraph from Rilke's 'Sonnets to Orpheus, Part II': 'Be here among the vanishing in the realm of entropy / be a ringing glass that shatters as it rings.' Ken owns a Rilke biography titled A Ringing Glass, and a translation of the German poems that speaks of 'the realm of entropy; most translations say 'realm of decline'. The German sei ein klingendes glas is usually 'be a ringing glass', but at least one translator prefers 'be the crystal cup that shatters as it rang'. Think back to 1975 and the shattered glass coffin that allowed a smothered Unsworth to resurrect ...

This article appears in excerpted form. You can read the entire article in Art & Australia's Spring 2009 issue.