Public art is a misunderstood scene, where the artist is the frontman and the installation studios are the backing band. In Australia, there are a few big players that design and build art installations, and they’re fairly corporate. 

That isn’t what Stewart and Moncrieff wanted to be. There’s an anti-corporate attitude to this place. Picture a design studio with artists from every conceivable discipline, and no real rules – that’s what it feels like.

When the time came to choose a real name for the studio, the pair wanted something ambiguous enough that it couldn’t be confused with anything else. Parts Department was perfect because, as Stewart puts it, “it sounds like we make car parts, or, you know, anything else really. It was suitably vague.” 

The tagline they later landed on – “we make stuff for people that need stuff made” – performs a similar function. It feels a bit like deflection. Like the pair don’t want to overcommit to doing too much actual work. But, it’s actually quite a precise description and, more importantly, one that doesn’t limit the scope of their work. 

That work, when you start looking at it, is improbably broad. I’m seeing project after project, some startlingly abstract, like disfigured 3D-printed mannequins that crouch like ghouls in a corner of the shed, and others unexpectedly scientific, like the hanging ornaments used to wind-test a larger public art piece that needed to be able to withstand a 188km/h cyclone. 

There is Whispers, the monumental installation by Quandamooka artist Megan Cope, sited at the Sydney Opera House for its fiftieth anniversary: two hundred timber poles studded with thousands of cleaned and threaded oyster shells, forming a fourteen-metre wall that emerges through the upper podium. Parts Department fabricated and installed it, working alongside Cope and her gallerist Josh Milani.

Then there is A Simple Story, a stainless-steel scaled-down replica of the Story Bridge by Sam Cranstoun, designed for Brisbane’s 2022 Botanica festival to sit half-submerged in a lagoon in the Botanic Gardens. It was their first project as Parts Department. The bridge changed colour at night, mirroring the lighting of the actual bridge a few kilometres east, while slowly disappearing under the water as the festival went on. Stewart shows me a photo of he and Moncrieff installing it, up to their necks in water. “Lots of eels ,” he says. “There were so many eels in there.”

More unusual is Doff-Stack, a 1.8-metre tower of fluorescent rat heads stacked into something that resembles a totem, by the painter Spencer Harvie, currently exhibited at the Institute of Modern Art’s Platform 2026. Harvie sent through what Moncrieff describes, admiringly, as a “completely insane drawing” and a digital sculpture model. Parts Department managed the procurement of the 3D-printed components from overseas, which arrived in boxes, and which were routinely held up in customs because, as Stewart points out, a box of 3D-printed body parts looks “pretty cursed on an X-ray.”

More lasting is Ambient Painting by Ross Manning, a permanent installation of more than fifty panels of dichroic laminated glass mounted along the lobby of 12 Creek Street in the Brisbane CBD; the glass reflects one colour and refracts its opposite, depending on where you’re standing. Stewart and Moncrieff worked with Manning to design and fabricate the mounts for the glass, how and where the panels would be installed, as well as the installation itself. 

And then there is the Fire Horse, which caught my attention above all else. Perhaps not the most deliberate artistic expression, but certainly the most insane installation yet.

In December 2025, agency Rizer approached Parts Department with an unusual brief, and a seemingly impossible deadline. The Star Brisbane wanted a five-metre-tall steel horse for the upcoming Lunar New Year – the Year of the Fire Horse – installed at Queen’s Wharf, on the seventh floor, that could erupt in flames at intervals throughout the event. The guys had three weeks.

“It was the project where we were the artists,” Moncrieff says. “That made it incredibly exciting, especially given the turnaround.”

There was no external concept holder. The brief was an enormous horse that could shoot fire from wherever the pair saw fit. The rest was theirs to figure out. 

What they built – laser-cut from six-millimetre steel plate, assembled in their workshop using cranes, magnets and fire-test rigs, transported to the seventh floor of a casino on a custom trolley sized down to the millimetre to fit a service elevator, and certified as an outdoor barbecue under the relevant Australian standards because, technically, that’s what it was – became one of the most photographed sculptures in Australia. 

Stewart explains that to make fire erupt from the horse’s mane and tail, they had to run concealed gas lines throughout the sculpture, as well as a pyrotechnic ignition system. “It’s actually no different to any other gas line, really, so we picked up the phone, called a pyro team and got it moving ,” he says. “It’s just a copper line with holes in it, but it’s hidden, and it lights a giant horse on fire.”