The NZ Garden & Art Festival's Sculpture Symposium, which starts this Wednesday, has had a sudden change of venue to Tauranga's Strand waterfront

The move is the result of an objection to its original intended location at the bottom of Mount Maunganui's Mt Drury reserve.

Wednesday's Sculpture Symposium will now take place at The Strand.

This moves the Symposium back to the site of its highly successful 2012 Garden & Art Festival event.

'While we were looking forward to staging the Symposium at Mount Maunganui, it is a bit like ‘coming home' to be back on The Strand,” says festival director John Beech.

The Burley Attwood Law Symposium will go ahead exactly as planned but in a different place, with 16 participating sculptors from all over the country arriving over the next two days.

By then the grassy space on the Strand waterfront will be surrounded by a low fence where the sixteen hunks of Oamaru limestone, Taranaki andresite and timber that are the carvers' raw materials will be placed.

The event opens on Wednesday at 10am with a powhiri, after which the artists will get to work. They have ten days to complete it under the watchful eyes of the public.

'We had a constant stream of people visiting the site during the last festival,” adds John. 'This central city location will allow many city workers to pop down at lunchtime and watch the sculptures taking shape.”

The symposium culminates with a public auction on Saturday November 22 from 11am.

'If it is anything like last festival's there will be spirited bidding and a few impulse purchases,” John says of an event which saw a near sellout of original works to private, public and corporate buyers.