Sam Harrison

Christchurch printmaker and sculptor Sam Harrison seems determined to resurrect the art of portraiture, single-handedly if necessary! His dramatic, delicate woodcuts and his bold concrete busts demonstrate the strength of traditional media in skilled hands.

Have a look at his CoCA Artist Profile here.

New New Artland!

Each week TVNZ 7 show New Artland provides a New Zealand artist with the resources to make a new artwork involving their local community, and follows them around watching how it goes.

New Artland has just started it's second series, Saturday night at 9.35pm, TVNZ 7, and repeated Tuesday night at 9.35pm. It's hosted by music legend and art commentator Chris Knox, who completed filming the series before being incapacitated by a stroke from which he is still recovering.

Saturday night's show featured Wayne Youle organising a mass tattooing event where participants were tattooed with a NZ map marked with their particular home place or places. That episode is available online here.

All the shows from the first series are also available through the TVNZ On Demand website, here. Do have a look if you haven't seen them, they're such an amazingly diverse set of projects. And because all the artists are pushing the boundaries of what they've done before and also collaborating with their communities, the results are excitingly unpredictable.

The award for single most surreal idea must go to Phil Dadson with his project to send a brass band flying in a fleet of hot-air balloons drifting on the breeze.

The single funniest episode features painter John Reynolds wanting to personally mark and number all the road arrows on State Highway 1, before coming up with another idea which was equally amazing but less labour-intensive. If he ever gets sick of being an artist, I'm sure he could have a career as a stand-up comic.

The episode which moved me the most was Lonnie Hutchinson's Anzac Day work featuring thousands of pansies and tens of schoolchildren.

Hardest-working artists in series one would have to be Wellington duo Raised By Wolves (Amy Howden-Chapman and Biddy Livesey) with their project Popping the Tent, featuring their own handmade tent, 3,000 balloons, and a lot of campers talking about camping!

Some of the most interesting works involve teaching art to young people. Ans Westra's project recruited local Petone schoolchildren to record things that were important to them with disposable cameras.

Judy Millar coached a roomful of initially reluctant high-school students in painting on a large scale, using mops, buckets, and other unlikely implements.

There's lots of other great stuff. Go have a look, the list of programmes is here.

Fiona Hall - Force Field

I can't remember when I last saw such a stunning sculpture show. Fiona Hall's retrospective at the Christchurch City Gallery is large, rich, and varied, almost too much to take in in one visit. It closes this Sunday, the 15th, so if you haven't already seen it, get down there. More information is here.

I'm going to list some of my favourite pieces to give you a taste:

Cell Culture

These familiar-looking Tupperware pottles have sprouted delicate limbs, claws, fins. They have morphed into new and alien forms of life.

Castles in the air of the Cave Dwellers

Models of insect colonies are attached, like outgrowths, to model human brains. A colony of social insects, which to humans seems like a utopia, a model world, is contrasted with the brain, a colony of cells that houses only one isolated individual.

Paradisus Terrestris

These exquisite sculptures are partly-open tins revealing depictions of human bodies, and each one is surmounted by a plant motif which echoes the human form within.

Syntax of flowers

Flowers are the reproductive parts of plants, and their beauty and their scent are designed to attract pollinators. This work plays with the idea that humans use flower perfumes to attract each other: The bottles of flower essences are decorated with paintings of naked women in frankly suggestive poses.

Scar Tissue

This work is housed in a cross-shaped display case, and consists of videos of war movies, with the videotape unspooling from the cassette and knitted into glittering, dark, frightening forms which hover above them. The forms appear to emanate from the video cassettes, like horrifying afterimages that cannot be erased from the memory.

When My Boat Comes In

In this work Hall explores the economics of plants, how the import, export, and exploitation of particular species, such as sugar, tea, coffee, and rubber have influenced the world economy and created huge imbalances of wealth. Hall has gathered banknotes from many different currencies, all depicting boats or ships, and on the banknotes painted the leaf of a plant native to each particular country.

Tender

In this work Hall has meticulously copied the forms of various types of birds' nests, using hand-shredded banknotes as her raw material. As the names of the bird species face off against the serial numbers of the banknotes, we are left to contemplate the consequences of commercial exploitation of natural resources.

Sky voyage

In this picture, part of Graham Bennett's sculpture Reasons for Voyaging sets off into the altocumulous undulatus (clouds). Outside the Christchurch City Art Gallery.

Image copyright 2009 Grace Dalley, all rights reserved.

Glass Invitational NZ at Canterbury Museum

Gallia Amsel: West Coast Surf 17 (2008), cast glass, sandblasted, acid etched & polished

The annual Glass Invitational NZ runs until February 8th at the Robert McDougall Gallery in the Botanic Gardens, and if you haven't seen it yet, you should get down there. It's a small but diverse show.

Particularly interesting to me were:

Elizabeth Thomson's Another Green World series of wall pieces, where spiny microbial forms emerge from depressions in a gently-moulded green landscape, which resembles 1950s upholstery.

Stephen Bradbourne's White linear bottles and White linear frond form, which are stunningly displayed in a black room by themselves, on a black pedestal with lights illuminating the white forms from below, so they glow. The glowing gourd-like bottle forms seemed full of life.

Elizabeth McClure's Domestic Science series, of scientific glassware decorated with floral and leafy patterns. The decoration is in some cases sandblasted onto the surface of the beakers and jars, and in some cases applied, creating the appearance of burnout velvet. The overall effect is subtly disquieting, a disconcerting mix of the clinical with the domestic.

Jim Dennison and Leanne Williams' Sophora Chandeliers, where cast kowhai blooms are suspended from glass brackets. I don't know if downlighting for these pieces was not available in this gallery, but they were displayed each with a glaring bulb in the centre, which destroyed the subtle play of light within the pieces that you can see on the website.

You can see all the pieces in the show illustrated here. But go and see it if you can, you get a lot more from walking around the artworks than you do from just looking at photos of them.

Giant eagle at Macraes

The extinct Haast eagle was the largest eagle ever known, so big that it preyed on giant moa. In the bird-dominated New Zealand ecosystem, the Haast eagles filled the niche of the big cats, or of bears - the largest land-based predators. When the giant moa were hunted to extinction by humans, the giant eagles also became extinct.

At the Macraes gold mine site in Central Otago, soon to be the site of Macraes Heritage and Art Park, a giant eagle sculpture made of stainless steel has been erected. The eagle was made by Queenstown sculptor Mark Hill in his studio in Arrowtown. It is 8m tall and has a wingspan of 12m, roughly four times the scale of the extinct bird, so it will be a landmark in the area. And how did it get from Arrowtown to Macraes? It flew, of course!
The ODT has more information about the sculpture here and there are details of the installation, plus a picture of the eagle arriving by helicopter, here.

You can read more about the Haast eagle on the excellent New Zealand Birds site here.
And because I couldn't resist it, here is a video dramatisation of a Haast eagle attacking a person. Please bear in mind there's no hard evidence that the eagles did attack humans, although there is evidence that humans hunted the eagles. Anyway, the video gives you an idea of the size of the birds!

Another highlight of the Macraes Heritage and Art Park is a vast installation of speargrass and snow tussock by Auckland artist John Reynolds. You can read about it in this Art New Zealand feature .

Gardens Sculptures

And does anyone have any idea who made these? I came upon them in the Christchuch Botanic Gardens, and they don't seem to have any signs telling you where they came from. They are awesome, anyhow.

New Tim Main show

Tim Main is opening an exciting new show of sculptural works at the Milford Gallery in Auckland on November 5th. His recent works are elegant combinations of Gothic architectural forms and New Zealand native plants. Read all about the show here.

Russell Moses: Garden of Light

The Dunedin Public Art Gallery has a brilliant Russell Moses show. Moses' works are paintings, sculptures, and fascinating hybrids of painting and sculpture. In one of my favourite pieces he has made a string of giant clay beads in the shape of a stellar constellation, to hang over a painted clay ground. Stars made of earth: I love it!

Other works reference mining, with patterns of metallic pigment emerging from a clay ground; Green paintings mimic the markings of pounamu, but also of light on water or trees in a landscape. Cross motifs in his work refer to measurement and surveying, the carving up and carving out of the land; the patterns he makes also evoke natural shifts and processes: night and day, movement of the sun and stars, seasons, growth and erosion.

You can see more examples of his beautiful work here.

New Tim Main show

Tim Main's stunning, subtle designs based on New Zealand flora draw on the tradition of William Morris and the Arts and Crafts movement, but have a gentle elegance all their own. His new show at CoCA is a must-see. It's on until the 20th July.

Graham Bennett exhibition - Converse

If you're in Christchurch be sure to catch this amazing show of Graham Bennett sculptures at The Art House in Gloucester St, until 15 June.
Bennett's subject matter in the show deals with New Zealand's antipodean location, mapping, navigation, and the migration of peoples by sea. His beautiful, immaculate forms also suggest sentinels, lookouts, and alien peoples.
The show's centerpiece, the monumental PoDs, features a crowd of 60 forms of various heights, the tallest up to 4 metres high.
Apparently Graham Bennett has just turned 60 himself. Many happy returns, Graham. :-)