In the Loop

"Passing Time." It's not until I go into the city - or as close as one can get in these days of ruin and red zones - that I realise just how out-of-the-loop I have become. This not helped of course, by the fact that I'm closeted away writing another travel guide. I didn't even realise this new sculpture - "Passing Time" by Anton Parsons - had been installed in the Wilson's Reserve area of Christchurch Polytechnic Institute of Tecnology (CPIT). It was commissioned by the CPIT Foundation and the Christchurch City Council Public Art Advisory Group and was installed several weeks ago... or maybe even months ago? I like it. The numbers on the loop depict each year between 1906 (the founding of CPIT) and 2010.

Auckland Art - A Sculpture Trail

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.

A Manawatu Sculpture Walk

I lived in and near Palmerston North in the Central North Island's Manawatu region in the late seventies but after I moved to the South Island in 1990, I've only ever been back there once. So when I rolled into town this year - in July - I was amazed by two very unexpected things - how much nostalgia I felt and that I actually got lost in now unfamiliar streets. I did however find what was the Manawatu Art Gallery in my day - now Te Manawa - Museum Gallery & Science Centre, which is currently undergoing a massive extension programme due for completion in late 2011. This is where I began a wander that tracked some of the city's public sculptures......the above unnamed, outside Te Manawa. Also outside Te Manawa, this - "Pacific Monarch" by Paul Dibble and commissioned by the Manawatu Art Gallery in 1992.

Further down the street, in the middle of a traffic island near the Palmerston North City Council building, I found this work - my favourite of the bunch - "The Returning Column" by South Australian sculptor, Greg Johns. Made of corten steel, the 5-metre high work, the work was acquired by the Palmerston North Public Sculpture Trust.

"United-Divided" by Christchurch sculptor, Phil Price is in the same vicinity and is the fourth work installed by the Palmerston North Sculpture Trust. It sits outside the Palmerston North Convention Centre and was unveiled in February 2010. Like its eerily similar Christchurch counterpart (in orange), the kinetic work rolls, dips, 'breaks apart' and rotates, "coming together and then dividing in a continuous, seemingly random, wind-driven performance." There's also a terrific work - "Numbers" by Anton Parsons and a beautiful wall work by Guy Ngan, neither of which I had time to photograph. All of the above, in addition to the striking collection of Maori sculptures in The Square, near the council buildings, are a very pleasing addition to the cityscape. While I found the remodelled square itself slightly 'communist' in feel, I always love it when a city installs contemporary public art for us all to muse over. It seems no two people can ever agree on their appropriateness, their beauty or their worth but that's half the fun of it. Good art should touch a few 'raw nerves.'

Ron Mueck - Prepare to be Amazed.

When the Ron Mueck Sculpture show opens at Christchurch Art Gallery this Friday night, there will be plenty of astounded viewers. Mueck has an uncanny ability to create astonishingly life-like works, as you can see from these photographs that I took at his Melbourne show at the National Gallery of Victoria in February.

And it doesn't matter how many times you see the images, or how many times you stand in front of the actual sculptures, there is still a sense of wonder about them. Yet for all the realism, Mueck's distorting scale is what generates the most power I think - the gigantic man (above), the tiny, fragile doll-like old woman in bed (the most powerful and moving of all the works for me), and these two adorable old ladies standing on a plinth, hardly as big as a five-year-old. It becomes realism with a disturbing twist that you will continue to think about long after leaving the exhibition. www.christchurchartgallery.org.nz

From the Collection

On a recent visit to Auckland, I had plenty of time to discover more of the sometimes hard-to-find public art that no body seems to promote in any real, cohesive way - say in a small booklet the way Wellington does - but every so often, I came upon things unexpectedly. The works shown here are not actually public works, they're from the Price Waterhouse Coopers Collection and are displayed in the $171,000,000, 33-storey tower block designed by Stephenson & Turner Architects at 188 Quay Street.

The building has the largest floor plates of any in New Zealand and was opened in 2002 by Prime Minister, Helen Clark. The blue work above is 'OKO' by Gregor Kregar, whose works, strangely, I kept encountering right throughout New Zealand on my recent road trip. The yellow sculpture is 'Yellow Construction 2002' (no surprises there), by Graham Snowden. The works was commissioned in fulfilment of the Works of Art Floor Area Bonus granted by Auckland City Council.

Revised Text: Thanks to a knowledgable reader, I can now expand upon the below uninformed waffle and state that the neon work above is by one of New Zealand's most celebrated artists, Bill Culbert (b.1935), who left New Zealand in 1957 to study at the Royal College of Art in London. Culbert, who lives in the South of France and London, returns to New Zealand regularly. Light has been a constant theme in his sculptural installations.

[This neon work however, remains a mystery. I'm thinking Paul Hartigan but perhaps I assume too much; he surely can't be the only artist using neon as a medium. Regardless, I like the way it circles whimsically through the solid entrance to the Price Waterhouse Coopers building. And naturally it looks much better at night when its form is more strongly outlined].

www.pwc.com

When Art Illuminates

I couldn't have been happier when I discovered this neon sculpture by Paul Hartigan in the Faculty of Engineering at Auckland University, as I walked down Symonds Street one wintry afternoon recently. Everything that I love had come together in one place - interesting architecture, glass, art, old/new, skeletal trees and, best of all, a tangle of fascinating reflections - layer upon layer of image, form amd texture.

I had already spent over an hour photographing the dynamic shapes and shadows of winter trees marching up the face of architecture old and new, so finding this whimsy of glowing red forms cavorting across the street and climbing the bare trees outside, was the perfect end to my street wander.

The work itself is Colony 2004 And Hartigan (b.1953) says the following in his concise artist statement:

"I made Colony to enhance and counterpoint the monumentalism of its site: the lecture theatre and surrounding buildings in the Faculty of Engineering. This expansive neon light drawing adds a sense of transition and movement to the space. Clustered elements radiate from a point, then travel towards the perimeter, morphing from semi-figurative motifs to abstract-surrealist gestures.

"Rendered by my trademark graphic style, a synthesis of writing, pictographs and abstraction, the forms appear random, chaotic or free-form but are actually highly considered and carefully placed. The title suggests a collection of related entities with similar goals cohabitating in a new found territory. I chose neon gas for its vital 'living fire' quality. The incendiary persimmon colour of the tubes is the chromatic opposite of the tinted green glass encapsulating the space."

I returned to this work three times while I was in Auckland, every time inspired again - not only for the way it so successfully captures the nature of its 'busy, colonised' environment but simply because I was so drawn to it and the way it appears to 'move and dance' away from its base, to fully interact with that environment via a set of ever-moving, ever-changing reflections. Lovely!

Walking Through

When I was in Wellington a few weeks ago, I sat outside Victoria University's Pipitea Campus, near Bunny Sreet and watched people coming and going, weaving their way through the four sculptures that make up "Seismic Shock," a work by Auckland sculptor, Louise Purvis, installed in 2006.

I'm always interested in the way people react to public sculptures, how they acknowledge them - or not - as they pass by; how they react to other people taking an interest in elements of what may be their everyday environment. I wonder how many people who pass these elegant Carrara marble spheres on a regular basis, have actually stopped and touched them and thought about their relevance. And why did my sitting on one of them raise eyebrows and get second, sometimes admonishing looks? I would have thought Purvis would be delighted that someone had taken the time to run a hand across their smooth, silky surfaces - surfaces that in fact represent topographic gridlines, earthquakes and their disruptive effects on the landscape. Scattered, as though flung about in an earthquake, these 3.5 tonne spheres give us the chance to contemplate the precariousness of life on a faultline. That's a little too sobering for some perhaps. www.sculpture.org.nz

Art in the Trees

Like a Mirage

Hoisted Above Trees

"Ripple"

By Neil Dawson

On the Riverbank outside Waikato Museum.

June 2010. Ajr

Reflections on Waterfront Art

So.....this is "Mimetic Brotherhood" by Peter Trevelyan, the latest work in Wellington's Four Plinths Sculpture Project outside the Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa.

Not the best or clearest of shots I'll admit, but they do demonstrate just how variable the works are at different times of day, in different lights.

These four bulbous but flexible forms made from hinged and mirrored equilateral triangles, envelope the plinths. Trevelyan was one of six sculptors invited to submit a proposal for the 2010 Four Plinths Project and his was selected by the Wellington Sculpture Trust and a panel of artistic advisors. As stated in a small brochure about the work, written by Abby Cunnane: "730 daylight skies will pass overhead during the period Peter Trevelyan's sculpture occupies the Four Plinths in Te Papa forecourt. 730 nights, 730 dawns, 1460 tides will change guard in the harbour. Scudding debris, wind-tortured kites and red-faced pedestrians will appear, and orbit, and depart. All this will be reflected in the multi-faceted mirrored surfaces of the four massive forms. And at the end of two years, they will leave as unaccountably as they arrived, like fictions, like diamonds conjured by fantasy, like extraterrestrial observers."

A very nice little piece of writing I might add. www.wellingtonsculpture.co.nz

Part of a Collection

"I Disappear"

Sculpture by Gregor Kregar

Museum Hotel Collection

Wellington.

June 2010. Ajr

Making Way for Art

"Invisible Art"

Anton Parsons

Every time I discover another public sculpture in inner city Wellington, my heart gives an excited little leap. The Wellington Sculpture Trust, formed in 1982, has this fabulous idea that urban spaces can be enhanced by a widely diverse assortment of sculptures by New Zealand artists - it's an idea I wish more New Zealand cities would embrace more whole-heartedly. Christchurch is getting there but I always feel there's a decided lack of good public art in Auckland - an no, I'm not counting Waiheke Island or other private sculpture gardens. I'm sure many people and Wellington and Christchurch ignore the works that are springing up in their midst - walk by them everyday without considering their message, their beauty, their context -though frankly it's a little hard sometimes given the size and presence of most of them. The choices made are always interesting and usually not without their controversy (especially in Christchurch) but I always see large, contemporary public sculpture as a continuation of sorts, of a city's architecture - an important contribution to 'the scale of things,' a statement about who we are as New Zealanders and the issues that inspire us to creativity. Sculpture should be as much a part of the fabric of any city as the people themselves in my view.

University Art

On a recent trip to Dunedin I flew around the city like a spinning top, grabbing information and photographs as the weather allowed. I snapped this scene (and sculpture) in the grounds of Otago University. I didn't even have time to pause and find out who the artist is - so if any Dunedin readers know, please leave a comment.

Phil Price - Another View

A Different Perspective on Phil Price's sculpture featured in the post below.

If you'd like to see more of Price's work click on Phil Price in the label line below.

Capital Sculpture

With yellow gingko leaves fluttering along Lambton Quay yesterday, I couldn't resist a stop to photograph this sculpture - Protoplasm - by Christchurch sculptor, Phil Price, July 2002, dwarfed by the splendid old MLC Building. I do love the way the Wellington Sculpture Trust and Wellington City Council have collaborated so conscientously to install sculptures all around the city. It makes for some delightful surprises as you wander the streets. www.wellingtonnz.com