"My Sister, My Self 2006" Michael Parekowhai. June 2007. AjrBack in 1950s-1960s New Zealand you’d often see an assortment of
residential garden ornaments that seemed perfectly ordinary – concrete seals with balls on their noses, white swans cut out of car tyres, gnomes, butterflies on walls – ornaments that today epitomise a slice of our suburban culture. So it was with great delight that I ‘welcomed’ “
My Sister, My Self, 2006,” to the top of the
Christchurch Art Gallery stairs yesterday. The sculpture is by one of our most renowned sculptural performers,
Michael Parekowhai. It pays homage not only to those garden seals but also to
Marcel Duchamp, who in his work “
Bicycle Wheel,” attached a wheel to a stool in 1913 and later described it as ‘readymade.’ Parekowhai’s work is constructed in fibreglass, mild steel, wood and automotive paint and this work, from an edition of five, was purchased by the Christchurch Art Gallery in 2007.
www.christchurchartgallery.org.nz
On a recent visit to Auckland, I was very taken with this sculpture suspended over the Engineering Department of Auckland University in Symonds Street. I searched inside and out and asked several people but I was unable to find out who the work has been created by. If any readers know, perhaps you'd like to leave a short comment about who the artist might be?
On a separate occasion, wandering in the grey drizzle of a winter afternoon, I came upon "Flight Trainer for Albatross" by Greer Twiss. The first work commissioned by the Auckland City Sculpture Trust, it's part of the Waterfront Sculpture Trail, which currently includes seven works. It's not a work that I'm personally drawn to - I much prefer Michael Parekowhai's Britomart work and Dennis O'Connor's "Raupo Rap" in Viaduct Harbour - but I certainly sympathise with the conservation message it adddresses. The work is a metaphor for the support we need to give endangered birds like the albatross. Every year untold numbers are killed or maimed through trawling and netting at sea and while not all are killed directly, thousands are maimed and unable to fly - which leads to their death by starvation.
