The sculpture looks a lot like this photo by the famous photographer Jacques-Henri Lartigue. The slow shutter speed of the camera has resulted in the wheels appearing distorted. In Angus' sculpture, the tilt might make you think of the experience seeing a car speed past at the corner of your vision. It evokes what we call 'kinaesthesia' - the use of one sense to describe another.

James Angus is an Australian sculptor who works in Australia and America. He is known for his uncanny and surreal sculptures of objects and animals, like this real Mack truck, which he squeezed into a corridor of the Art Gallery of NSW in 2004, or this pink giraffe that always seems to be falling.

Angus' sculpture reminds me of the works of Italian Futurism, a movement founded in 1909 by the poet Filippo Marinetti. Futurists chose machines as their subjects, and adopted techniques like cubism and abstraction to describe movement and speed. They also glorified war and played a part in founding the fascist movement in Italy (though James Angus doesn't share their political philosophy!).

Some 20th century Australian artists were influenced by Italian Futurism, like Frank Hinder, who studied a variation of Futurism called 'dynamic symmetry'. In this painting Hinder describes a bomber crash that he experienced while serving as a camouflage officer in the Second World War. He understood the power and danger of modern machines

The Type 35 Bugatti is one of the most successful race cars of all time. In the 1920’s and 30’s it won over 2,000 races, including the iconic 24 hours of Le Mans and the first ever Monaco Grand Prix.

Ettore Bugatti, who founded the car company, came from an artistic family. His father was a furniture and jewellery designer in the Art Noveau style, his younger brother was a sculptor and his grandfather an architect and sculpture. He was also related to the painter Giovanni Segantini, who influenced the Italian Futurists. Ettore spent time at art school before moving to cars. He believed his cars were works of art. Each one was meticulously hand-crafted and engine blocks were hand-finished so that their surfaces were so flat that gaskets were not required for sealing them.

There are a lot of legends about Bugatti cars. The Bugatti name was rekindled in 2005 with the release of the Veyron. The Veyron was capable of achieving speeds over 407km/h, making it the fastest production car of all time. In 2010 a Bugatti Type 25 was fished out of a lake in Switzerland where it had been dumped by a tax official. It sold at auction for about $150,000!