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The magnificent Centenary sundial has been enhanced with a sculpture garden at its feet.

A year after the mosaic sundial on the west wall of the University Club was presented to UWA during Centenary celebrations, the project is complete with a cluster of mosaicked organic shapes and espalied mandarin trees, nestling in beds of white stones and gravel.

UWA graduate and Oscar winning artist Shaun Tan designed the installation in collaboration with long-time friend and supporter Susan Marie, Director of UWA Extension, and Helen Whitbread, landscape architect and Manager, Sustainable Initiatives.

The freeform shapes at one end evoke big smooth welcoming river stones, all three superbly cloaked in the same blue and gold Venetian glass tiles that make up the sundial. A gleaming golden egg sits alone at the other end of the small courtyard.

Susan said Shaun had never done any landscape designs so she and Helen came up with some ideas that would look as though the colour had dripped from the sundial onto the ground.

"We also wanted the installation to be friendly and accessible, so people feel comfortable to touch them and sit on them," Susan said, " I hope people will have wedding photos taken here."

"After Shaun completely revised the design, as artists do, it was over to mosaic artisan Iain Middleton again, for the very difficult job of covering rounded surfaces with the glass tiles."

Shaun wrote that the design was a response to the fairly spare and angular sandstone forms of the site, in which he wanted elements to break the tension of those lines with simple curved organic forms.

"The design also needed to relate to the large sundial above ... the vertical image carries a sense of air, light and celestial objects; something on the ground needed to be about the earth, solid mass and gravity," he wrote.

He said the gold egg had a suggestion of wisdom, which related to the University setting.

"The extrusion of three-dimensional forms out of a two-dimensional image, as if having fallen out, is interesting and playful. I do hope that it's a space that invites active casual use and also acts as a campus landmark.

"Hopefully people will say ‘meet you at the gold egg'," he wrote.

The whole project was funded by corporate sponsor, Hawaiian, as well as Convocation, Combined Friends and Friends of LWAG, and Susan is delighted with the outcome.

"I think we should create a Gross National Happiness index like the Bhutanese, and rate things that just make us happy.  This would certainly be one of them," she said.