Poliness’ practice revolves around history, art and the environment; she has been making abstract art since the early ’80s. A fan of DIY culture, she says punk rock was starting DIY bands and she is involved with DIY theatre. Now, she helps people make DIY art, providing guidelines for interested members of the public to follow.

On Saturday, participants could follow the lines she drew, “then get the hand of it themselves by making the lines heavier and denser”.

“I’ve spent quite a bit of time with the stairs, measuring them, thinking about how the drawings would work, watching people stage protests, watching people walking up and down them, going to and from work.”

Spending time outside the building that represents democracy in Victoria has been a joy. “It’s definitely a shared space. Although it was built in the 19th century as a monument to government and power and was not designed to be inhabited back then, it is now. People are able to protest and be free; it’s a really amazing site, it’s a real privilege to make something on it.”

Before taking a piece into the public domain, she creates it on paper and computer. Setting up this particular work was quite a detailed process, in part because of the stairs.

Commissioned by the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, supported and approved by City of Melbourne and the Parliament of Victoria, the work is also part of the Uptown exhibition, set up by Robert Buckingham and Fiona Scanlan to attract visitors to the top end of Bourke Street. Poliness says her work and Uptown more broadly is about artists’ relationships with the city, how they respond to and engage with it and how it inspires them.

Her use of diagonal lines and grids is inspired by the idea that grids dominate the world: cities are built on grids, data collected about us is collected in grids. Poliness says she is interested in the idea of adaptive meshes: grids that can adapt to the environment and people and refine the way we think about the way we engage with the world. “In a lot of the wall drawings I do, the geometry is complex and yet simple.”

Next week she will use completely different drawings to create another piece, in front of Canberra’s National Library. “Nothing is perfect, nothing is identical in life, but everything around us appears to be,” she says, using an iPhone as an example. “If you have a microscope, you will see every one of those is different. We’ve become so good at mass producing things and making things look the same; we assume things can be perfect. Even the architecture at Parliament House, it seems perfectly symmetrical – but that is not exactly true.”

If you’d like to help create the work, visit ACCA.melbourne to register; limited places available.