Observation / Action / Reflection

I met New Zealand sculptor, Andrew Drummond, twenty-three years ago - in 1987 - when I was living in Wanganui. He arrived there as the Sarjeant Gallery's Artist-in-Residence at Tylee Cottage. Wanganui was a small community, especially in the arts field and it wasn't long before we crossed paths. Later, when Andrew was beginning work on a major installation in the Sarjeant Gallery Dome, he needed some 'manual labour' to help weave the forms that would make up the installation. It just so happened that I had spent several years previous to that - in my days as a young married mother in Auckland - weaving baskets as a sideline. And so we took to willow weaving in a big way. And, being the stickler for detail that I am, I also photographed the entire process - right through to an opening night fortified by copious champagne cocktails - and compiled the images into a handmade book. (I was working as an artist myself at the time and handmade artist books were, and still are, a particular passion).

I've included a few photographs of some pages from the resulting book (above), which hides away in a cabinet with the dozens of other books I've made at one time or another.

"Viewing Device, Counter Rotating" 2008-10. Christchurch Art Gallery Foyer. Image AJR

All that, by way of a convoluted introduction to the fact that Andrew Drummond opens a major exhibition at Christchurch Art Gallery this week. Observation / Action/ Reflection is Drummond's first comprehensive survey exhibition and when it opens on Thursday night, it is bound to intrigue and mesmerise. As his foyer work above demonstrates - Drummond has come a long way from weaving organic works like his "Coming and Going" of twenty-three years ago - materially at least, for even then his gigantic, ambitious works had a seductive power. But his commitment to art, his ideals, his philosophies have never wavered.

Andrew Drummond Counter-Rotating andEarthing Device 2000. Brass, glass, copper, electrical system. Reproduced courtesy of the artist. A visit to Drummond's Christchurch studio is an eye-opener. Like his sculptures, the environment is huge and technical - more like an engineer's workshop in fact. And yet the resulting kinetic works that come out of it - sleek, shiny, mechanical wonders - have a disconcerting power that draws you in, a kind of robotic humanity that sets you to thinking about all manner of things.........."where quirky, individualistic machines, making use of water, air, electricity and light parody your own individualism, bodily mechanisms and human sensory systems," wrote art historian John Finlay recently.

Andrew Drummond Vented Hanging Device with Shelter 1994. Mixed Media. Reproduced courtesy of the artist. Photograph: Lloyd Park. Drummond never shies away from testing his creative, physical and intellectual limits - nor those of the viewer - no matter what it takes. He has an idea - and he does everything in his power to bring it to reality. And in the lead-up to his survey exhibition at Christchurch Art Gallery, I for one am eagerly anticipating a spectacular show of innovative, captivating works with a 'presence' that will send many away re-thinking what art is and can be.

Andrew Drummond room for Observation (detail) 2003. Mixed media. Reproduced courtesy of the artist. Photograph: Brendan Lee.

Andrew Drummond: Observation / Action /Reflections opens at ChristchurchArt Gallery on May 14 and runs through to September 5, 2010.

www.christchurchartgallery.org.nz

Art Meets Engineering

Christchurch Art Gallery is currently teasing us with two spectacular foyer works by acclaimed Christchurch sculptor, Andrew Drummond. They're the forerunner to Drummond's first comprehensive survey exhibition - Observation/Action/Reflection - that opens at Christchurch Art Gallery in May. The survey show covers a diverse range of works from 1980-2010 - everything from sculpture, installation, documentation of performance art, drawing, photography and technology. The above work is "Viewing Device, Counter-Rotating" steel, aluminium, air-system, paint 2008-2010. Partially-funded by Creative New Zealand, it is suspended the full height of the gallery's glass foyer - a powerful, mechanical presence that quietly glows and rotates, catching the exterior light and instilling a sense of wonder in viewers. Higher up on an interior wall, Counter-Rotating and Earthing Device, 'hisses and whirrs' as it brushes past a glass and copper earth-plate, causing a visible and audible electrical charge. Together, they provide obvious clues to Drummond's passion for technological innovation and precision engineering - and to his ability to "combine aesthetics and technology to create machines that reference both nineteenth-century and cutting-edge inventions. His full exhibition runs from May 14 to September 5. www.christchurchartgallery.org.nz

An Exploration of Place

Image Courtesy of Sarjeant Gallery Te Whare O Rehua - Whanganui Around twenty-two years ago when I lived in Wanganui, I worked with now-Christchurch-based New Zealand sculptor, Andrew Drummond, weaving willows to create the sculptural pieces for his incredible Dome installation at Wanganui’s Sarjeant Gallery. Andrew was the Tylee Cottage Artist-in-Residence at the time. Ever since then, I have been intrigued to see how the many artists since have responded to the gallery’s Dome space – I’ve even featured one or two of them here on this blog (just click Sarjeant Gallery in the label line below if you’d like to see them). Now it’s the turn of celebrated senior New Zealand artist, Bill Culbert. Culbert (b.1935), divides his time between London and France and this work – Bill Culbert 180˚ x 2 Whanganui (shown above) – is the only one he has completed for a museum during his time in New Zealand for the launch of the monograph of his life’s work, “Making Light Work,” which has been written by Ian Wedde and published by Auckland University Press. (He has also created a work which is showing at Auckland's Sue Crockford Gallery). Culbert spent three days in Wanganui back in 2008 noting ‘the ordinary’ in his surroundings – “vernacular architecture, tyre marks and architectural debris in salvage yards” – at the same time sensing and noting the power of the Whanganui River that runs through the town. According to the Sarjeant's senior curator, Greg Anderson, Culbert's resulting installation within the space is "an exploration of space, spatial reference and harmonies of theory and concrete reality. It is a re-telling of his experience and understanding of Wanganui, firmly and critically placed within the Dome area, which acts as the work's frame and context." “It is one of the characteristics of Culbert’s work that, as an artist, he seems to be ‘plugged in’ to the power and vigour of places and objects,” says Greg Anderson. “This kind of understanding, of the nature of things, imbues his installations with a depth greater than their sole sculptural appeal……In his pictures (eight large scale photographs of local sites) of Wanganui scenes, in his placement of fluorescent light tubing, he gives us and asks us, in our mind’s eye, to take a journey to the places he’s found and to experience the emotions and sensations he discovered during his Wanganui expedition.” Culbert’s show at Sarjeant Gallery Te Whare O Rehua - Whanganui runs until November 29, 2009. www.sarjeant.org.nz